Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#2[deleted]
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#3I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts?
Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad?
Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#4I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
I'm no expert but "private equity" seems to be a common refrain.
First a company builds good products to build a band, then sells the brand.
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#5I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
? The Starliner landed successfully, so we have shown that we can iterate.
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#6I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
My only take listening to Apollo recordings is how much time they spent debugging issues. It seemed constant.
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#7I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
> I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts?
I think SpaceX has been doing a great job of that, with Crew Dragon.
> Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then?
Yes, but also fewer options. This is the first time NASA has ever had a choice between two completely different American spacecraft to return crew on. It is like if you own two cars, and one is having mechanical problems, so you decide to take the more reliable one for a long trip; but if you only own one car, you would just have risked it with your only car, since you don't have much choice
> Is Boeing genuinely this bad?
Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting – in which cost overruns are charged to the taxpayer – to the new world of fixed price contracts. Not just with NASA, also with Pentagon projects such as the KC-46 aerial refuelling tanker.
By contrast, SpaceX is a much younger company, so it never had that cost-plus culture. Plus, it has the advantage of being privately held – so no stock market to satisfy – and investors who are confident in its long-term prospects, so it isn't afraid to lose money on contracts in the short-term, expecting to make it back in the longer-run. By contrast, Boeing is tempted to cut corners in the development process to limit their losses on the contract.
According to the rumour mill, part of how this whole fiasco happened: Boeing gave Aerojet Rocketdyne incorrect requirements specs for the thrusters. Boeing then sent Aerojet updated specs, but Aerojet refused to redesign the thrusters according to the new specs unless it was paid more by Boeing, which Boeing didn't want to do. So instead Boeing just decided to risk it with the incorrectly designed thrusters. They cooked up some analysis to justify that doing so was safe, but obviously that analysis was wrong.
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#8Saw the reentry fireball in the sky from AZ, which was pretty.
Glad it made it down in one piece, hopefully they'll be able to troubleshoot the problems better because of that.
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#9I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
Because all of the welds were done by people who had their own know-how, and they retired without passing it on. And this is stuff you have to train on several decades, not just "follow the instructions".
We can still redo it, but it is fairly complicated to restore the whole industrial base to match the past 1:1.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
Re: Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
#10I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
Generations and corporate cultures change. We've gone hard over into thinking that modeling and simulation alone can lead to greater profits due to (presumably) less infrastructure and fewer people on the job. Time and again it fails and we refuse to learn from it. The current trend in aerospace is Digital Transformation which is all the modeling and sim taken to 11. Making hardware work requires a certain mindset and a lot of practice. There's no money for either.