Boeing was awarded more money for their vehicle, had years of extra time and two previous demonstration flights. This flight should have been close to flawless given the additional time Boeing had for remediation and testing. Boeing engineers should have understood their systems well enough to convincingly demonstrate the vehicle met NASA's safety requirements. Even after much additional testing during the flight they couldn't make their case. Starliner will probably complete its third uncrewed return intact and people might question if NASA was being overly cautious but perhaps Boeing should have supplied a crewed vehicle with reliable thrusters and avoided this embarrassment.
I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly. Boeing used to be able to build 747 under budget and ahead of schedule, just like Lockheed could dazzle the world by creating U2 ahead of schedule and under budget with fewer than 200 people (or < 100?) in 15 months with the cost of a few millions. It can't be just the change of geopolitics post Cold War, right? It can't be just that the fixed-margin structure imposed by the government, right? It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right? It can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of accelerated decline as any old-enough company, right?
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
I dont blame NASA, who knows what else is wrong with that capsule.
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
The Boeing of today is merely a husk of its former glory. If the U.S. had another viable domestic airplane manufacturer I bet we’d see a lot more pressure on them. That can still happen. I hope it does.
Breaking up businesses that are “too big to fail” is good for the economy in the long run, and for defense firms is arguably an issue of national security. It seems to me an incredibly bad idea for a nation to have all of its defense eggs in a single, increasingly fragile basket.
NASA failed to communicate the seriousness of the issue from the beginning. Their press conference mentioned all the work they've been doing for MONTHS. Who knew? Everyone thought things were 'fine'. Huge huge huge failure by NASA here. They can't be trusted.
It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.
We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.
You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.
This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.
We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.
I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.
Space journalist Eric Berger of Ars Technica has been speaking to his contacts and writing articles about the very likely SpaceX Crew 9 plan for the last week.
This was the only way this could ever play out. After all of Boeing’s last five years, even if 100% unrelated, no bureaucrat anywhere would take that risk. If something goes wrong, you’re the idiot who put the astronauts on a vehicle from a company who has had a long string of recent failures.
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
Many of you might assume that Starliner is a cost-plus contract. Cost-plus contracts are common for large capital projects but they often end up running way over budget because the provider is essentially incentivized for budget overruns because they get paid more.
It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2 billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We ened more of this.
SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus contracts.
It's common for companies and governments to want to have more than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to be substantially lower than Starliner's.
So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for its failures.
Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted to SVP.
I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit or more risk to the station and crew.
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
I doubt NASA wants to put 4 astronauts on the next Starliner flight. So if NASA declares this crewed flight test a failure and requires a redo (and possibly even reverting back to a third out of one planned uncrewed flight test), Boeing is still on the hook for their operational 6 crewed flights.
Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.
So, what happens if it does blow up, or otherwise has a catastrophic failure on re-entry? Will we be able to say for certain if it was due to Starliner’s faults, or just the fact that there wasn’t a human pilot?
All Boeing hate aside this is a learning experience for everyone involved.
[+] [-] shirro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|1 year ago|reply
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
[+] [-] acomjean|1 year ago|reply
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
[+] [-] johnbellone|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] projectileboy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bottlepalm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] torginus|1 year ago|reply
I'm still processing that sentence
[+] [-] rx_tx|1 year ago|reply
- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats
- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
[+] [-] dev_tty01|1 year ago|reply
Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.
[+] [-] HeatrayEnjoyer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sebazzz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] daveevad|1 year ago|reply
What shall we make of all of this should it succeed?
[+] [-] sitkack|1 year ago|reply
This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the vehicle?
Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rockemsockem|1 year ago|reply
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
[+] [-] trothamel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dev_tty01|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Archelaos|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ijidak|1 year ago|reply
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
[+] [-] treflop|1 year ago|reply
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
[+] [-] jstummbillig|1 year ago|reply
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] electriclove|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hereme888|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zpeti|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nullhole|1 year ago|reply
"NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew"
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
@dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current one?
[+] [-] rst|1 year ago|reply
(Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters, and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)
[+] [-] kiddico|1 year ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...
OR
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...
[+] [-] someperson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|1 year ago|reply
But I bet the market will have some things to say on Monday, unless Boeing can do some damage control before then.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|1 year ago|reply
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
[+] [-] andromaton|1 year ago|reply
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
Practically nobody was asking "how are they bringing back starliner?"
Practically everyone was asking "how are the astronauts returning?"
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
Obviously, they're not gonna just count out the humans involved, but it make sense they want to focus on the core mission.
At least that's how I understood it from listening to the press conference for the last half hour or so.`
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|1 year ago|reply
It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2 billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We ened more of this.
SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus contracts.
It's common for companies and governments to want to have more than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to be substantially lower than Starliner's.
So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for its failures.
Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted to SVP.
[+] [-] bigyikes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fnord77|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cft|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _zoltan_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] practicemaths|1 year ago|reply
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
[+] [-] Laremere|1 year ago|reply
Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.
[+] [-] kotaKat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] laweijfmvo|1 year ago|reply
All Boeing hate aside this is a learning experience for everyone involved.
[+] [-] jonplackett|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bottlepalm|1 year ago|reply
Boeing is cooked. SLS should be scrapped. There has got to be consequences for over spending, under delivering, and outright failing.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|1 year ago|reply
(From an alternate submission, I'd recommended that URL be substituted for the Twitter link.)