US law allows companies to split off a subsidiary with all the liabilities and the main company to continue to function with all the assets just like before https://www.ltltalccommittee.org/
They would never get another space contract again if they did that, but they can see this will be a larger market in 30 years, so they'll lick their wounds and continue on commercial space projects.
They're also vastly different projects. Phantom Express was very much experimental; Starliner wasn't supposed to be. Part of the selling point for Boeing was "this is mundane stuff we already know how to do".
For that investment to work, they need to bring in some revenue as well. The ISS is scheduled to retire by 2030. Let's assume this capsule goes operational in 2025 and flies twice a year, that's 10 flights to recoup well, well over a billion by then. Let's say a 100 million per flight. Not sure what the contract is exactly, but it's not looking great.
Pretty sure SpaceX is cheaper, so NASA will be the only customer.
NASA has already awarded all the ISS crew flights up through it's scheduled retirement in 2030. Boeing is contracted for 6 flights, and SpaceX for 14 (including the 6 it has already flown). NASA hasn't published the milestone payment schedules, but the total contract was for $4.2 billion, so Boeing would have needed to budget a 26% profit margin on the whole endeavor to break even at this point. That wouldn't surprise me, but they are probably quickly reaching the point where they will actually be losing money.
> Because Starliner was funded by NASA through a fixed-price contract, as part of the Commercial Crew program, Boeing is responsible for any cost overruns and financial losses due to delays.
Given Boeing’s history here this feels like the right kind of contract for this sort of work. Ensures all incentives are aligned
The current NASA administrator, a bureaucrat who grew up during the Bush Cost+ era, is actually opposed to fixed-price contracts because they only save a lot of taxpayer money and might not actually help us get deliverables faster.
There is a different perspective on that from large acquisitions around firm fixed price contracts.
If you're doing some low risk building, say a 10 mile road on flat ground with known soil, replacing a previous road, that is well-known to current specs with set-in-stone requirements (no pun intended) it is easy to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor will know exactly what to do, and there are 20 road building companies that could do the work.
Now, building an advanced spacecraft with a host of uncertainties in a vastly more complex environment that may require novel technologies development and a great deal of engineering is very different if you want to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor perspective is that is very risky, and there are likely going to be changing requirements.
The contractors will want to make the Govt pay for that risk, since they are on the hook for it. All risk is on the contractor. The contractor will also fight for $ for every changing requirement.
By comparison, in a time & materials contract, the risk is on the government, and changing requirements don't matter much, if you change them, risk is still on the government.
This explains why firm-fixed price is not always the best approach, and sometimes time & materials contracts may make for a more economical acquisition approach - because risk and changing reqs can translate into dollars.
You can't even get your plumber to tell you how much it's going to cost to get your toilet working smoothly again. And you want to get to the moon on a fixed budget? (Which will also require a toilet).
Software has the same problems. An unreasonable expectation of being able to predict the future (except the bits they don't want you to know about), and a lot of whining when we run into unexpected issues.
Uncapped cost plus contracts (Time and Materiels contracts) are a plague, but not for the same reason, just like a Firm-Fixed Price contract that moves all risk to the contractor are a plague too, because if the contractor is carrying all the risk, they're going to make the government pay for all that risk (and aerospace engineering is risky).
Any contract type where the political leadership can't terminate a contract for cause due to excessive political pressure, or is forced into paying through the nose, is untenable.
The solution for that is not Firm Fixed Price or T&M contracts - but instead larger budgets and also multiple award contracts where you have simultaneous efforts competing against each other. When there are 5 options, all having company skin in the game, all as viable paths forward, and 1 option loses out, terminating for cause, enriching the other 4, no harm no foul.
That wasn't the NASA Administrator, Bill Nelson. It was Jim Free, Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development[1]. Nelson has been a surprisingly strong supporter of fixed-price contracts, given his background.
Fixed price contracts can be quite a problem in high risk projects.
The issue is that incentives absolutely aren't aligned. The moment Boeing thinks it has achieved a certain part of the contract but NASA does not you have a huge problem on your hand where one side will try to get work done for free and the other has absolutely zero interest as they are not getting paid.
If cost overruns are too great Boeing might also (depending on the contract) choose to withdraw, as the continuing development cost will be greater than any penalties from the contract.
As much as I like the idea of having multiple independent vehicles (and knowing the impact of having your only crew-capable launch system grounded when it happened in the shuttle era), Starliner has been in systems integration hell for years now, always just a couple short months away. Boeing withdrawing and NASA restarting the bidding process for that contract might benefit everyone.
I would exclude SpaceX from the bid, but Sierra Space is the obvious other option with their Dream Chaser. Apart from Sierra and ULA there is also everyone who bid on the lunar lander, meaning Dynetics and the "National Team" (Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin)
This comment is your regularly scheduled reminder that they were supposed to be the safe option. The people who'd come in clutch when SpaceX failed (and it was assumed in certain quarters that SpaceX would fail to deliver on time). They were paid 2x more than what NASA paid SpaceX.
To be clear to readers, the were only paid for their achieved milestones, which is nowhere near the full contracted amount since they haven't flown anyone.
As for the 2x part... it's cause their bid was 2x what SpaceX bid itself. And both got their bids accepted.
> As for the 2x part... it's cause their bid was 2x what SpaceX bid itself. And both got their bids accepted.
Mostly.
NASA did just give Boeing extra money for some pretty dubious reasons.
> NASA instead requested Boeing “propose prices for additional flexibilities to fill an anticipated crew access gap, including shortening its lead times for rocket and spacecraft production,” the report states. After what OIG described as “prolonged negotiations,” NASA agreed to pay Boeing an additional $287.2 million for those mission flexibilities.
> The OIG report concluded that much of those payments were not necessary, since there were other methods to provide schedule flexibility to mitigate gaps in crew access to the station. The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
> OIG also criticized NASA for not giving SpaceX, the other company with a commercial crew contract, an opportunity for offering its own proposal to address any gap in crew access to the ISS. “In our judgment, contacting both providers would have been a prudent approach to maximize the Agency’s options while also ensuring fairness,” the report concluded.
> NASA did just give Boeing extra money for some pretty dubious reasons.
Actually, a multiple award approach for a very high risk, technically challenging widget makes perfect sense, and is the same thing seen for similarly challenging weapon systems e.g. the Advanced Tactical Fighter F-22 vs F-23
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/americas-f-23-ste...
> The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
This looks like Boeing was doing some horse trading that could have been pretty financially risky particularly considering the value of money.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
Sometimes when thinking about the Industrial Base of the United States, there is a good rationale for keeping an incumbent's design & engineering capabilities active, while bringing competition to the table and potentially displacing it with a more agile competitor.
If truly getting the best and most efficient designs out there was the true goal, there should have been more awards, and for funded development to enable a greater diversity of competitors with designs being put forth.
> If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do it.
SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA.
It is clear that the longterm for SpaceX, and their competitors, is going way past mere launch services (as complex as those are) to cis-lunar and interplanetary missions.
Getting a healthy ecosystem with robust competitors is just the start. NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
> SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA.
No. The CRS missions were displacing Arianespace. The CommercialCrew flights were displacing Russia. Commercial came from Proton, Soyuz and Ariane 5. Only military came from ULA.
> NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
Yes, its called the Clips program. IT shouldn't be part of CC.
> Yes, and NASA awarded SpaceX $278m in 2006 dollars from the COTS program when SpaceX had never even flown a rocket.
OK.
I'm not really sure what your point is. NASA gives out contracts to new companies all the time. And the award was in a firm, fixed-price contract.
The difference between that and the previous example is that NASA had already awarded Boeing money for CCtCap (the commercial crew contract). And then they just decided to give them more money, for what can charitably described as bad reasons.
COTS was literally a grant to the private industry to challenge it to create a private rocket industry. What is the problem when does literally what is was supposed to do.
> You see nothing wrong with handing out nearly $300m to a company that's never done anything or demonstrated any capabilities?
1. COTS was a milestone based, firm, fixed-price contract. Which means that NASA didn't have to pay for work that didn't get done. If SpaceX failed at development, NASA could have chosen a different company and retained most of the money.
Which actually happened - Rocketplane Kistler basically did just that. And NASA replaced them with Orbital Sciences.
2. Established companies like Boeing and Arianespace entered bids and NASA seemed to think those bids were worse than the eventual winners.
3. The program largely worked - SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were successful at delivering cargo to the ISS. And all indications are that Sierra Nevada will be successful soon.
4. It was way less expensive than the traditional NASA route.
> In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 development costs were on the order of US$300 million. NASA estimated development costs of US$3.6 billion had a traditional cost-plus contract approach been used. A 2011 NASA report "estimated that it would have cost the agency about US$4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes" while "a more commercial development" approach might have allowed the agency to pay only US$1.7 billion".
Probably no significant impact, and probably no significant difference between the two. It's angled so it largely doesn't touch the capsule (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_Pad_Abort_Tes...) and the capsule is made to keep the occupants safe through reentry, which reaches higher temperatures and lasts much longer than the second or two the pad abort rockets fire.
(It might even be less heat impact to the capsule than the Dragon-style rockets, as the hot spent rocket remains on the capsule; Apollo-style abort towers jettison.)
It might seem a little sketchy but it worked well. When they flew it on a small rocket to test it, the rocket accidentally broke apart but the escape tower system then performed perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeJzItldSQ
Boeing has offices in nearly every congressional district, and has been openly bribing congress for decades. They will never fail, experience hardship, or suffer consequences for anything so long as the current republic stands.
All of the big defense contractors do this, it’s kind of astounding. Lockheed, Raytheon, etc. their offices are spread out over the country to give enough coverage in congressional districts where no one will be willing to kill funding for a project at the risk of their local plant closing.
Also the contracts the big companies have with vendors across the country. They still purchase a large portion of their parts and talking to congress members about the jobs a program creates in their district is a strong data point.
The military-ness has now outweighed the engineering culture in those companies...making them effectively government agencies that are publicly traded. I don't have a positive outlook for any stakeholder.
IMO the only reason those companies are not literal divisions of the government is plausible deniability so they can sell things to other countries. I would guess 95% of their revenue is from the government, and they have very strict government regulations. If we just nationalized Lockheed and friends, I would be we could get improved efficiency.
What you say is true but now they do have some competition from SpaceX. If we make other companies that can compete with Boeing we can at least have price competition which is really the only thing that is needed.
Boeing though has so many government contracts that are used so often for other projects you can’t shut down so you are correct.
You don't need to tear down the Republic, but you do need to elect representatives that can somehow stand against the relentless current of lobbyists jockeying for appropriations.
This comment hits differently after the Ukraine invasion. I hadn't thought about the sheer level of diplomatic nightmare that has been avoided because Russia can't use cutting off access to the ISS as a bargaining chip.
They still can use cutting off the ISS as a bargaining chip since half the station is Russian and handles orbit raising. They actually did do that a lot early into the war, until Rogozin was replaced as head of Roscosmos by someone who took a slightly less bombastic approach of saying that Russia would quit the ISS once they have a successor station up later this decade.
What gets in the way is that the US has several replacement space station programs in the works while Russia knows very well that they almost definitely can't get a comparable replacement station up with how hollowed out their industry is.
Plus, since the start of the war, NASA has been investigating options for taking over the tasks the Russian side of the station handles with the various supply vehicles just in case.
Isn't it the Russian modules that keep leaking atmosphere? Maybe its time to jettison them? I honestly have no idea what the Russian modules are or what purposes are are served by them.
However, that does bring to mind something I never thought about. There is talk of privatizing ISS since NASA doesn't want to continue funding it. How do you privatize something made by multiple nations? Or is that precisely why the privatization isn't taken seriously?
One of the purposes of ISS, and other space programs (Apollo-Soyuz for example) was showcasing how nations can work together, and bringing hope for peace during the cold war. May sound naive, but that's the reason why nobody should be jettisoned off the space station - even if there are embargoes on the ground.
There have been some incidents with Russian modules and spacecraft over the years demonstrating the gradual decline in their capability, but so far it hasn't been determined to br worth the effort of figuring out if the sides can even be disconnected anymore.
The talk about private space stations isn't really about privatizing the existing ISS. There are private trips to there every once in a while (required to be led by any former astronaut at the ISS though).
Besides that maybe you're thinking of Axiom's space station, which is intended to have modules docking to the American side of the station and gradually building off of it until their modules can handle being independent, at which point the ISS modules would be disconnected and deorbited, leaving their private space station on its own.
> half the station is Russian and habdles orbit raising
The orbit raising has been performed by the Progress resupply vehicles from Russia and Shuttle and other vehicles from the US. As of 2018 the Cygnus resupply vehicle from the US was capable of performing the orbit raising mission.
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
IIRC, NASA and SpaceX are working on a study to see if Dragon can do station keeping for this exact reason. NASA is doing a great job hedging their bets in a very tricky political climate.
Building a commercial station isn't very easy. And if you are not investing a a couple billion your not even in the game.
Non of those companies will invest billions on their own. All of those companies investment is predicated on NASA support.
Do you really believe Northrop Grumman will invest billions of its own money?
The Startups are to small an inexperienced.
And Bezos has already said they will not do this unless they get NASA investment.
To just link to a bunch 'commercial' stations is missing the point. These concept exists because NASA has announced they will fund multiple 'commercial' station. But unfortunately Congress has not given NASA the budget for these.
There's quite a gulf between what's promised and what's been tested. Despite the backfilling about just a test and total success there's were a LOT of big failures in that first launch test.
But what's the market for those, without NASA funding? Maybe one Salyut-sized station for "space tourism" (that is to say, 1-3 day stays for like 3 people at a time), and maybe one similarly sized station for space manufacturing (which is currently just optical fiber) and commercial 0g experiments. You could dock both together to share some systems. But what's the market demand for anything beyond those two stations, never mind any station comparable to the ISS?
Starship economics change everything. Today, it costs on the order of $1500/kg to hoist something to orbit with a Falcon 9. Even if you add a zero to Elon's predictions of $15/kg with Starship, you're still reducing costs by 10x, which means zero-gravity manufacturing at scale, space tourism for 100 people at a time, etc etc becomes possible.
I'm pretty sure the number of people who'd be willing to pay money to vacation in LEO is considerably larger than what a single Salyut-sized station can house - even before considering the rise in demand from lowered costs.
That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.
Ok, let’s break this down from the start. Russia has launched 10 space stations. The ISS was built using modules that were built for the Mir-2 station. The ISS was built on top of Russian modules.
Meanwhile, NASA wasn’t even able to fly their own astronauts to the ISS for a decade until Musk stepped in.
Russia has also demonstrated that they continue to have this capability as they added the first expansion to the ISS in over two decades recently.
I would hazard a guess that Russia’s capability in this area is much more… capable than the US at this time. They are also far more likely to be able to come to a collaboration agreement with china than the US is at this time. They also helped india kickstart their space program recently.
In conclusion: Russia bad? Maybe. But they weren’t stupid enough to outsource their manufacturing and allow the loss of institutional knowledge that the US has.
Russia added a module that had been sitting around for 13 years and was only finally launched because warranties on some parts would've begun expiring. Then the first thing that module did was flip the station. While yes, they have a history of doing better than the US on space stations, the point is that their space industry is a shadow of what it used to be.
This can be seen from how many next generation rockets, rocket engines and crewed vehicles they've announced over the years which have never really ended up amounting to much. For instance, the timeline on Orel makes Orion seem like a speedy development.
Finally, while the US did make that mistake at first, they've very obviously more than recovered that knowledge considering how many different engines, launch vehicles, spacecraft etc are in actual (as in having working hardware to show and not just mockups and promises) development by several different American companies.
Plus, much of the former Soviet space program can be attributed just as much to Ukraine, where a lot of the R&D happened ;)
Indeed. Though Rogozin was a net benefit to Roscosmos over the past decade, as can be seen by their current launch record, with 100 successful launches in a row over the past few years. However, he is definitely not a Musk type visionary. From what I know of him, he's a "fixer", that was sent in to clean up the ridiculous amounts of waste and corruption in the system.
Under Borisov's management there are rumors that they are building a new satellite factory that should be starting production soon.
And realistically, let's not forget that the US has always significantly lagged Russia in this field. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip they would not have been competitive at all.
>Ukraine
Let's be honest here: Ukraine has existed as a state for less than 40 years in it's entire history. The geographic location of current Ukraine has nothing to do with the accomplishments of the former USSR. This is evidenced by the complete and utter lack of any accomplishment in the field by Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.
I'm not holding my breath for Russia collaborating with China on a space station. China already has a space station. Before it launched there were talks of a collaboration with Russia, but China put their station in an orbit with quite a low inclination, which makes it practically impossible to reach from Russian launch sites. That indicates that China is not at all interested in working together with the Russians.
I've been wondering, with the rocket science knowledge the Ukraine has, are they not capable of designing and building mid-rage missiles for their military, or is that just a much longer process?
I still can't get over this quote from the congressional hearing with Michael Gass, then-CEO of ULA,
> Some of the most unique missions clearly don't need multiple capabilities in this country, and if we talk about fair and level competition, is it two companies, is it three companies, is it four companies? When does it stop, and how do you limit other companies from wanting to participate, and taking a niche of the of the product?
This was the same hearing in which Gass gave a last ditch defense of Russian engines, and fought Musk in favor of cost-plus and ULA's ~$800m/y subsidy for existing.
Even the people that follow newspace probably normally don't realize just how rotten through the industry and its governance had become.
I agree with this, it is pretty stunning. Also ULA's inability to come up with a launch capability that is anywhere close to Falcon/Falcon Heavy in terms of cost and time to flight.
The fascinating thing is that the lack of competition allowed the space launch industry to switch from "invent" mode to "monetize" mode way too early. It is also what makes the Starship work both more credible and more interesting. There are a lot of technical problems to work through on Starship between now and it being as reliable as say Falcon is, but if (when?) they get there, the ability to put 100 tons into LEO for just the cost of the propellant and some depreciation on the vehicle? That really changes the economics of having things in space in a way that is hard for folks to imagine.
There's also been a bit of a shift in the market for space launches. For the longest time there wasn't that much of a market for a higher volume, cheaper launcher like the Falcon as the number of launches were really limited to mostly government launches and a handful of communication satellites. Recently hardware has gotten much cheaper which combined with cheaper launches skyrockets the number of groups that could design and send up a payload because the economics on both ends finally met up.
I think the nuance is different. I think there has always been demand of inexpensive access to space, what did not exist was a company willing to invest in making that true. If you lived through the "Single Stage To Orbit" (SSTO) initiatives that were kicked off by Regan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars" project to put "hundreds" of satellites into orbit, the idea of a cost insensitive customer willing to pay for tens of launches a year, drove a lot of investment into the market. When SDI was cancelled rocket companies bailed and investment fled. Even though billions had been invested in Iridium, and millions had been invested in Teledesic, the "establishment" could not see how having such a capability would be useful. Sort of like prognosticators suggesting that the world demand for computers might be just five from IBM in 1943. People who are stuck looking at the cost/availability in the "now" cannot imagine a future where those things are different.
One of the things I've always looked for in hiring people is the ability to "unconstrain" ones thinking by "rules." Those are the kinds of people who can think about a world where we have a technology to say, "nullify gravity", and what impact that might have on what we do or how we do it. Constrained thinkers will say, "There is no way to 'nullify' gravity so it isn't worth wasting any time thinking about what we could do if we could."
This capability shows me someone who is able to step into a different frame of reference with their reasoning skills intact and sharp. As a result, when there is an "unexpected" discovery or event, they waste little time in cognitive dissonance says "This can't be happening" or "That isn't possible what I'm seeing" and instead jump right to "Hmm if we can do that then <x>, <y>, and <z> could be done too!"
There are a lot of things to dislike Elon for, but one thing that he shares with Steve Jobs is if he believes a thing he is "all in". Sometimes it takes that to get to the other side of an "unthinkable" change.
While you raise a valid point you chose a terrible example as even Elon, as crazy as he is, refuses to go against the laws of physics. Even he has a limit(for now at least). I get that its just an example: its just that Elon might throw you out of his office.
Its also this kind of thinking that gets people into trouble ie. completely destroying a working codebase because one only thinks in first principles and cannot map human factors(which are inherently too complex to reason mathematically) onto this other plane of thinking.
There needs to be a balance between the unconstrained dreamer and the practical realist.
Steve Jobs had a group of trusted confidants (Tim Cook, Ive and the other leaders) to help reel him back to reality from time to time.
You could argue that Bill Gates had Ballmer to help keep in him check.
I agree. Real question: What do people need gigabit internet for today? 4K UHD streaming video needs 25-50Mbps. I have been living off 100Mbps internet connection for more than a decade, and I feel no need to upgrade. To be fair, maybe gamers need super faster connections for lower latency, or game downloads.
Families, and reducing friction on gaming purchases. The sooner you can download a game (especially with new business models like game pass), the sooner you know whether you like it and the sooner you get positive feedback from your purchase decision. The faster that loop is the more people will impulse buy, and the faster consumers can get the games they want to play.
A huge part of it is less about the gigabit download, and more that gigabit fiber is symmetric and has fast uploads... In the age of being remote, several people can be on HD or even UHD webcams without much lag or hiccups. 12Mbps upload of many cable modems is a noticably worse experience.
Excellent point. I didn't think about video calls needing good upload bandwidth. Many broadband options have terrible upload bandwidth, so you need to buy a ridiculous plan (like 1Gbps) to get reasonable upload bandwidth.
> They were paid 2x more than what NASA paid SpaceX.
It's worth a case study - why didn't they try to pay Gwynne Shotwell 10x more + CEO role + (M\B)illions worth of stocks? Even if they did, why didn't she accept? She would certainly have turned their fortunes around.
She takes care of everything except the Mars program. Falcon is well established at this point and very few engineering iterations remain. It’s a “done” product and the cash cow of the company. Elon runs the Mars program out of Boca Chica but the day to day operations, (ie the boring stuff), including Falcon, is all Gwynne.
There was a time when Boeing was a Washington state company, with a strong engineering tradition and contribution. You can pretty much correlate the count of failures and overruns with the era when the mergers and buyouts started, the engineering substance was diluted, and management moved "off site" to Chicago to be "more accessible".
As a Washington state resident that used to be proud of Boeing, now days, I just despise them. I work with lots of fine ex Boeing engineers at my current place of work. I feel for all of the fine individuals that still work at Boeing, but other wise, I wish them the same death I wish on IBM now days.
No "Rest In Peace" from me. More of "Don't let the door hit you..." feeling.
While there are concerns with the bidding process, I think this is a pretty big "nothing", in the grand scheme.
There is some pretty horrific anti-Boeing spin.
> Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time.
> Asked whether Starliner might be able to launch this year, Stich did not offer a concrete timetable. "We're not really ready to talk about a launch opportunity yet," he said. "We're going to work the technical issues first, and then we'll sit down with the Boeing team when the time is right and pick a launch target."
Reasonable and responsible as a response. However, Ars spins that response into:
> Such an answer suggests that Starliner's launch on an Atlas V rocket ... may very well slip into 2024.
I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
> Given the ongoing delays, it is now possible that Crew-9 flies next fall, before Boeing's first operational mission, Starliner-1.
Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
All 100% speculation. The "ongoing delays" in this context are "in June, Boeing announced that it would push back the July launch".
I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
Ars (and its Space editor, Eric Berger, who has written books about SpaceX) are pretty heavy proponents of SpaceX (which I generally am too, despite being less enthusiastic about its leader), and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.
> > Such an answer suggests that Starliner's launch on an Atlas V rocket ... may very well slip into 2024.
> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
Atlas V . . . is America's longest-serving active rocket. In August 2021, ULA announced that Atlas V would be retired, and all 29 remaining launches had been sold.[ As of 10 November 2022, 19 launches remain.
The Atlas V has absolutely nothing to do with the launch delay.
The "brand new space vehicle" is the Starliner.
> that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the "soft links" in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft
July CST-100 issues, announced right before a CREWed mission:
* parachute "load limit data wasn’t correct and restest showed failure at a loading point"
* wiring tape "flammable and will need to be replaced"
* thrusters again: "Boeing also found more valve problems on the Crewed Flight Test capsule, as they were getting ready to load propellants onboard."
These are all serious human safety issues; any could be fatal. If I worked at NASA, I'd ask for gold plated resolution of these before an astronaut goes near CST-100.
Delta IV and Delta IV Heavy have had a pretty good track record. Only one more will fly though, and ULA's replacement (Vulcan) is still vaporware (thanks in large part to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin having numerous delays in producing the engines for Vulcan... )
Oh, I know. And I continue to be amazed at how much healthier of an engineering culture ULA has than Boeing for just that reason. It would be one thing if it split off before the "out-sourced profits" era at Boeing. I'm not familiar with how the amalgamation happened, though.
> The Atlas V has absolutely nothing to do with the launch delay.
Boeing announced in May 2016 that their first crewed flight would be delayed to 2018 due to issues related to Starliner's Atlas V N22 launch vehicle. [0]
Starliner's problem isn't delays--it is a failed program. The only thing delayed is terminating the program and selling those high value but soon to depreciate Atlas V boosts to something worth doing. (7 of 29 remaining Atlas V (as of 2022) are allocated to Starliner. To get past 7 requires a whole new integration/test/certification for Starliner.)
Each contract required four successful demonstrations to achieve human rating for the system: pad abort, uncrewed orbital test, launch abort, and crewed orbital test. [0]
Test Boeing [1] SpaceX [2]
pad abort 2019-11-04 2015-05-06
uncrewed orbital test 2022-05-19 2019-03-08
launch abort N/A 2020-01-19
crewed orbital N/A 2020-08-02
Atlas V is indeed an old launch vehicle. Starliner, however, is a brand-new (kinda) space vehicle. It still has to pass crewed validation.
Kinda new, because it has seen 2 flights, of which 1 a mission failure (failed to insert into target orbit due to software issues, several other issues identified hours before a potential hard mission failure), and the other an uncrewed test flight.
> this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality
The comments section of any Ars Starliner article is a must-read for me. These guys were devout Boeing haters and would endlessly praise SpaceX - that is, until Elon become public enemy #1 last year and they suddenly and abruptly shifted their hate and derision the other way. Not a single independent thought on that entire forum, unless you sort by most critical and painstakingly weed through the hidden comments. The articles are crafted to be red meat for their core readership. At least The Register is unashamedly a tabloid and doesn't pretend they're not. Interesting to see how they spin this.
The haters don't want to admit space flight is really really hard and Elon, excuse my language, fucking nailed it.
Richard Branson is a billionaire who tried to do spaceflight long before Elon and Virgin Galactic hasn't launched anything useful (before SpaceX) as far as I know. If someone thinks a suborbital flight is impressive I highly recommend them to play KSP and find out how easy that is compared to getting into orbit.
So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything.
It takes more than a pile of money to run a successful space program and how nobody can see that by now is beyond me.
> So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything.
I think the contrast between Musk's SpaceX and Twitter experiences is largely down to whether the organization grew up around Musk. SpaceX has an immune system built up for the nutty stuff, from Gwynne Shotwell on down. Twitter got thrown into the deep end with zero staff powerful enough or with the experience to do the post-idea cleanup work.
It's a huge mistake to say "Elon had nothing to do with SpaceX's success". It's also a huge mistake to say "SpaceX's success means Musk's Twitter plans are good".
I think saying that SpaceX is somehow "containing" the nutty stuff in a way that Twitter is not isn't all that accurate.
SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.
Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.
SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.
There's a vast spectrum of nuttiness available. I don't think you see SpaceX successful without the Gwynne Shotwell sort of characters involved; I think Twitter lacks such a role.
Ah yes, I agree on that. I think even Elon kind of admitted how she was important for that.
IIRC when FH had turned out to be harder than expected and not really all that useful due to F9's increased performance, Elon had wanted to cancel it, but Gwynne insisted that it stay because they had already sold it to customers and dropping projects like that would be bad for business.
After watching him operate Twitter, it seems that he's not a good businessman or technical contributor. What he says about programming and his approach to engineering speaks of unearned confidence, and he uses the same tone to talk about aeronautical engineering, leading me to believe he doesn't know what he's talking about.
From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.
You are mixing up Virigin Galactic and Virgin Orbit. One is suborbital tourism, the other is sat launch. VO is bankroupt. VG has raised so much money from clueless investors that they are not quite bankroupt yet.
My only point was it takes more than a billionaire with a dream to create a space program. VG is a complete failure from a getting into space perspective, I don't care how much money investors have given to them. They don't have anything unique or worth mentioning.
How Branson shuffles money around between VG and VO is irrelevant if the goal is getting into space and the name of the company matters even less.
It's quite sad to see the public perception of spaceflight getting ruined by making sure that everybody's first association upon hearing the name of the most awesome rocket company is "Spacetwitter".
Berger has a pretty good record with the estimated NETs. There have been several cases of him stating that a launch has been pushed back with a bunch of public pushback from others, only for him to turn out to have been pretty close.
> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
> But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
A few month delay? It was originally supposed to fly in 2017. with Crews in 2020.
And SpaceX Crew-1 was originally supposed to fly in November 2016, and was then delayed a year, and then another two years, and then another year, finally flying in November 2020.
It was delayed the same amount of time as Starliner initially. Now Dragon is operational, and Starliner still isn't done with the final design/assembly of it.
Well Starliner was originally contracted to be certified in 2017. So a few month slip on top of the 5+ year slip already maybe justifies some of the skepticism from ARS
Would be nice to see some of that skepticism applied to Crew-1, when it slipped 4 years, but Ars treated SpaceX announcements as gospel truth.
Hell, the launch article for Crew-1 (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-t...) literally did not once mention that that launch was delayed, let alone 3 separate year+ delays. Just about SpaceX "saving" NASA from "wandering around in the wilderness with no access to space".
Except Crew-1 Happened in 2020, Staliner-1 has been delayed until probably late 2023, 2024. Demo-1 Happened before OFT-1. They both started at similar times and also their delayed missions were delayed by similar amounts initially. By all accounts, Starliner is behind is every possible way with much greater funding than SpaceX.
SpaceX is at Crew 7, Starliner isn't even close to Starliner-1
> By all accounts, Starliner is behind is every possible way with much greater funding than SpaceX.
That's only true if you assume SpaceX strictly allocated budgets per program and that no revenue from their other missions have gone to the crewed flight programs.
I'm not saying Spaceliner is a success, or that there are arguments to be made about each company's approach (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
None of that removes the fairly evident bias that Ars can be counted on to spin anything SpaceX in a positive manner (a la ignoring years of delays to talk of SpaceX saving the day for NASA, while a refusal to commit to a launch date following a just discovered issue for Boeing immediately implies more years of delays).
Sure its startup SpaceX that has massive amount of money from other programs that the can smash into Dragon. Its not like the were not also working on 5 other development projects at the time.
It Eric Berger, not "Ars". And he absolutly did report on all the SpaceX delays. After the testing explosion he even said SpaceX might be behind. Stop spreading your conspircy threory nonsense.
> completely neglects to mention any delay whatsoever when talking about the Crew-1 launch
The Crew-1 delay was three years ago. Why would he mention it in this article?
> spins a lack of a confirmed updated launch date less than three weeks after discovery of issues into a delay that will approach 2025
Reasonable, given how it's gone so far. They've yet another parachute issue, and accidentally used "hundreds of feet" of flammable tape.
> "perhaps even after Crew-9", which is hilarious given that even Crew-8 doesn't have a launch date other than towards the middle of next year, and Crew-7 is currently facing new delays
> The Crew-1 delay was three years ago. Why would he mention it in this article?
The Crew-1 delays were not mentioned once in the article where Crew-1 actually launched - he just spent the article patting SpaceX on the back for saving NASA.
Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays. And speculating that Starliner may not even launch until after Crew-9, when Crew-8 isn't even announced, but will be mid 2024 at the earliest, and that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days, but "because of another launch" - that other launch being a SpaceX launch that was delayed.
However you spin it, this journalist has a near allergic avoidance of the word "delay" when it comes to SpaceX, and can't wait to spin Boeing delays into worst case scenarios that are entirely speculation. There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
> The Crew-1 delays were not mentioned once in the article where Crew-1 actually launched - he just spent the article patting SpaceX on the back for saving NASA.
The article about Boeing finally getting their crewed test done is in the future, so it's a little odd to be mad at a slight that hasn't yet happened.
> Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays.
Yes, the article about the delays is about the delays. Why is this surprising?
> that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days
If you're going to point out two-day delays, Berger's pointing out two year delays seems eminently reasonable. When they eventually do fly crew, a "after years of delays and additional test flights at Boeing's expense" is probably warranted in the article.
> There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
The last Starliner delay was nine months long. Crew-9 beating the Boe CFT is entirely possible. SpaceX and Boeing both had their first orbital tests in 2019, but SpaceX has flown eight NASA crewed flights (and three commercial) since then to Boeing's zero.
One of these programs is currently troubled, the other has hit its goals and won extra contracted flights. You really can't wish these facts away, and a journalist would be goofy to ignore the difference.
The idea that for the rest of history, SpaceX Crew-1 delay has to be brought when talking about Starliner is nonsense. Its not bias. It common sense for a short update article like this.
> less than three weeks after discovery of issues
It has been much longer then 3 weeks.
> which is hilarious
Eric Berger has a very good track record when talking about delays. He usually has information from inside the industry. I'm gone go with they guy that has predicted correctly over and over and over again the last 10 years.
I don't really care if you think it's 'hilarious'.
Dragon is on regular cadence, short term delays of one doesn't necessarily even mean that the launches after that will be delayed to.
> (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
Yet SpaceX is still cheaper despite those damaged barges and craters. And that's really all there is to those, a cost element. It would be different if they had left smoking corpses but they haven't.
So disingenuous. SpaceX’s “craters”, whatever that means, are not from mission failures but from working on booster landing and reusability, _after_ successfully delivering their mission payloads.
SpaceX landings require reserve fuel and thus much lower cargo capacity to attempt, and failure to land cost millions in equipment when it doesn’t work. So, cost wise it’s little different than failing to send up an additional satellite.
Partial mission success gets them a paycheck, but it would be interesting to look at their financials and see if they lost money on those missions.
So does, "Announced in 2012 to be launched in November 2016, the program suffered numerous delays until four years after the initial launch date, it's taking off..."
> and the situation in Russia
Presumably you mean the Ukraine invasion, which had zero bearing on this, given that it happened nearly a year and a half later...
I mean I guess you are correct it was late but it was still first relative to Boeing. So the timeline warranted less emphasis then say now when Boeing is delayed 3 plus years on top of that.
I’m not sure how you can say the Ukraine invasion has zero bearing on the “NASA…having no access to space”. Given starliner is a dumpster fire and NASA would not be able to reliably count on Soyuz for access to ISS, it was a remarkably prescient statement. Even if Russia hadn’t invaded in 2020 it was obvious that NASA having its own capability to get to ISS was a strategic priority, that was only achieved by SpaceX.
> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
The hubub is not about the few more months of delay just anounced.
The starliner and the dragon 2 started development around the same time to deliver about the same thing. The first crewed dragon 2 launched in 16 November 2020. It is not about the months of delay, but the years.
Those were largely delays in funding (4+ years) not just the actual program. “In July 2010, Boeing stated that the capsule could be operational as early as 2015 with sufficient near-term approvals and funding.”
“On September 16, 2014, NASA chose Boeing (Starliner) and SpaceX (Crew Dragon) as the two companies to be funded to develop systems to transport U.S. government crews to and from the International Space Station.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
The first orbital test failed to reach the ISS because it accidentally burned too much propellant. A second error nearly made it burn up on reentry and had to be fixed in orbit.
The second orbital test failed to launch because the craft's valves couldn't handle humidity (despite being designed to launch from Florida). When it finally went (after a complete rebuild of those valves), multiple thrusters from two different systems failed in orbit.
The third orbital test - the first crewed - has been now indefinitely delayed.
You’re skipping over the bit where “After analysis and corrective actions it was launched on May 19, 2022, and completed a successful mission to the ISS, clearing the way for the crewed flight test.”
They had an initial failure, and 1 delayed but successful mission. The 3rd mission is again delayed, that’s fairly normal for manned spacecraft. Rocket science is hard, news at 11…
Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays,
just using their initial announcement date let alone when funding was actually provided. That’s just simple math.
There's a major difference between internal tests intended to discover problems and "we think everything's good, NASA, can we send it to the ISS?" tests intended to show everything's working.
> Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays
Sure. Add on additional years worth of failed tests on the actual production vehicle and you get the $1.1B in the article. Boe-OFT was now nearly four years ago.
They were only different in how expensive they were to conduct. NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing all expected these tests to have a significant risks, which is why they where unmanned.
The entire point of spending that much money was to discover problems. As to your “sure” if admit Boeings delays are less than half of total delays, that sounds like you agree with me.
Anyway, Dragon 2 as an iteration of an existing platform was by far the lower risk option. But, that’s a completely separate question.
Dragon 2 is _not_ an iteration on Dragon 1. It’s a completely different vehicle and it was risky for SpaceX to go the route of developing a completely new vehicle. Yet they got it done, cheaper and faster.
You can make that argument, but they share quite a bit of hardware and software. Considering how many software issues Boeing ran into that alone was a huge advantage.
Plenty of things were updated like IDSS, though that’s an evolution of the old docking standard etc etc. But in the end the unmanned dragon 2 is using the same Falcon 9 rocket, on literally the same mission. SpaceX even called it extended dragon in several places. The crewed version of Dragon 2 is shares most of its design though with abort thrusters, life support, etc.
Yes, the Commercial Crew funding was spread out over more years than NASA wanted due to insufficient budget from Congress, which delayed both SpaceX and Boeing. But Boeing has had 3 more years of delays on top of that due to bad engineering.
SpaceX is the only organization in the industry that prioritizes speed. For the regulators and the other players, they are all pretty happy to do things at their own pace and speed.
By "other players" do you mean the incumbents? Parties with existing revenue streams and contracts stretching out years without any performance requirements?
Anybody who is guaranteed a job with a decent salary for life and a great retirement plan is not incentivized to perform except by some personal drive. Anybody who wants onto the gravy train is motivated to do whatever work it takes to get a seat at that table. And they are motivated to do it as fast as possible.
It is not wrong to prioritize safety over speed. But you can use the safety excuse to drag things out for as long as people are willing to pay you without producing results. While space travel risks involve the obvious threat to human life, those risks can be generalized like any other risk. Usually, the lower the risk, the lower the reward. Unless there is something interfering. Interference that manipulates the risk/reward ratio often has the smell of corruption in the minds of many people.
Objective reality seems to be that SpaceX's first (successful) crewed flight (to the ISS) was completed a bit over 3 years ago now. And SpaceX is well into its 6th operational NASA ISS mission since then.
Vs. Boeing still has not finish assembling a Starliner capsule that meets NASA's safety spec's. Right now, "speculation" is saying that Boeing will ever successfully fly a Starliner mission.
At this point it is probably going to be a human rated Dream chaser. they were the 1st looser in the original commercial crew contract. They seem to be on track for a test launch later this year for Commercial Resupply.
Blue Origin is another company that talks a good game, but they've yet to put anything in orbit. If NASA is casting about for a second supplier, there were other rejected bidders on the current human space transport contracts (e.g., Sierra Space's Dream Chaser, still under development in a cargo variant) which seem less risky.
Boeing was awarded the crew contract at the same time as SpaceX in 2014. The first crew mission was Dragon in May 2020. Fast forward 4 years, seven NASA and three private crews have flown on Dragon. None on Starliner. Can you say with a straight face that it isn't a serious delay? A few months, really?
Keep in mind that Boeing was awarded $4.2B, compared to $2.9B for SpaceX, for the same number of flights. Not to mention that NASA was accused of favor treatment for Boeing during the development phase - See What we found section of [0]
> Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
Such is an ignorant take. The rotation of ISS mission is currently 6 months, so there are always two missions a year, in the Spring and the Fall, barring extraordinary circumstance such as with Soyuz MS-10. Crew-8 will fly in the Spring, to be followed by the first Starliner operational flight. However if Starliner upcoming test flight continue to be delayed it's entirely possible that Crew 9 will fly instead.
> I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
It's not Ars' framing. It's common knowledge - [1], and reported by Boeing itself - [2]
Boeing on Wednesday reported a $257 million charge in the second quarter for its Starliner astronaut spacecraft program, bringing the program’s to-date overrun costs to $1.5 billion as delays continue.
The aerospace giant blamed the charge on its decision last month to indefinitely delay the first crewed Starliner launch.
> and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.
The article is very short. Everyone should read and judge for themselves. I think it's mostly matter of fact without sensational takes. Can't say the same about your post (horrific anti-Boeing/reeks/hilarious).
I truly hope this is the beginning of the end for these bloated "boomer defense companies".
Palmer Lucky actually started a defense company after seeing just how inefficient and bloated those big companies were, and is already worth 10 billion! Highly recommend watching this interview he had about the future of all this.
So there is indeed a market for private flights? Saudi Arabia and Turkey also purchased seats on Dragon for their space programs. The market exists alright
Yes it is. It is hoped that finding commercial applications for space technology will benefit NASA by giving providers more opportunity to amortise development costs and lower prices.
It isn't all billionaires but they are part of the picture as it is probably around $55 million per seat for orbital flights though the exact numbers are not disclosed.
Axiom's last mission had two Saudi astronauts (Saudi airforce captain and a biomedical scientist) funded by their government.
The next Axiom mission will be flying astronauts for the Turkish space agency(air force colonel), Italian defence force (test pilot) and Swedish space agency/ESA (test pilot, esa astronaut) as well as their Axiom commander who is a legendary ex-NASA astronaut.
Even the upcoming Polaris Dawn which is funded by billionaire Isaacman will have two SpaceX lead operations engineers and an ex-USAF fighter pilot onboard and Isaacman is a respectable pilot himself. They are going to be pushing private spaceflight to new limits.
It is exciting to me to see a company that is willing to spend $billions$ on research and allow it to continue when it is doesn't lead to immediate profits and any visible gains.
It is depressing to work for a company that seems immune to wasting $billions$ and countless human resources wandering around lost.
When there are no consequences for failure there can be an amazing culture of innovation. There can also be a dumbfounding culture of negligence and mismanagement. Sometimes we only distinguish between the two based on survivorship bias.
This is the opposite. Because Boeing has no culture of innovation, their capsule was conservative in every choice. Slow development, bad software practices, lots of established slow contractors. That why it is expensive and behind schedule.
And the are continuing to build it not because of innovation but rather because it would be an utter and complete embarassment for them to give up. They would lose all credibility as a space contractor and would have little chance to ever bid for another big NASA project again.
>Because Starliner was funded by NASA through a fixed-price contract, as part of the Commercial Crew program, Boeing is responsible for any cost overruns and financial losses due to delays.
Whoever it was in NASA that got that into the contract deserves a promotion
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Elon also said the Falcon 9 would work, said it would be re-usable, said the Falcon 9 heavy would work, said the Model S would be good, said the Model 3 would be great, said the Model Y would be the most popular car in the world, etc. etc.
Obviously he's not hitting 100%, but you can't deny his companies are achieving immensely more than anyone ever thought possible.
If I could take Elon's ratio of "I said it would work vs. it's real and it does", I would, and so would any sane person.
Right, and you can land on the moon with basic newtonian mechanics. The are millions of devils in the details but for a person to decide how big a rocket to build and whether it could land vertically after a payload of X that needs a delta-V of Y, its easy napkin math to prove feasibility.
Executing it is then one of the hardest things people can do but SpaceX had all the best people at the time.
> If I could take Elon's ratio of "I said it would work vs. it's real and it does", I would, and so would any sane person.
I want to be optimistic too, but you're missing Falcon 9s worth of broken Elon promises.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but certainly a more complete: https://elonmusk.today I recommend starting from the bottom.
I'll just say that if he were a baseball player, he would be a pretty bad one. The odds that an Elon prediction pans out are fairly bad. If a bookie were available, you'd want to take the under on every single one.
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This is I am sure a stupid question but is that a lot?
In the context of building a new rocket system?
Allegedly the development of the F35 cost about $35 billion
according to one 2020 study.
(Which I think was estimated at the start to about $400 million
in non-inflation adjusted dollars)
If I look at it through that frame, spending $1.1B on developing
a rocket seems ok (I Know they are not done so the cost will keep rising)
To be precise, this is not about the development of a rocket: Starliner will launch on an existing rocket, the Atlas V.
This is about developing and building Starliner spacecraft, putting them on Atlas V rockets, and after successful acceptance tests putting people in them to fly them to and from the ISS.
I've since learned that apparently the tape itself is non-flammible, but the glue ON the tape is flammible. The manufacturer was a little liberal in their interpretation of the specs.
Kind of interesting to think about relating this to the ongoing UAP hearings, where it's alleged that private government contractors overbill for projects and funnel the extra money to the UAP programs. Boeing has been mentioned by name a few times.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadBoeing wouldn't need to pay anything.
People say that, but I don't think it's true. Boeing pulled out of the Phantom Express project seemingly unscathed.
https://www.space.com/boeing-withdraws-darpa-military-space-...
Pretty sure SpaceX is cheaper, so NASA will be the only customer.
Given Boeing’s history here this feels like the right kind of contract for this sort of work. Ensures all incentives are aligned
If you're doing some low risk building, say a 10 mile road on flat ground with known soil, replacing a previous road, that is well-known to current specs with set-in-stone requirements (no pun intended) it is easy to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor will know exactly what to do, and there are 20 road building companies that could do the work.
Now, building an advanced spacecraft with a host of uncertainties in a vastly more complex environment that may require novel technologies development and a great deal of engineering is very different if you want to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor perspective is that is very risky, and there are likely going to be changing requirements.
The contractors will want to make the Govt pay for that risk, since they are on the hook for it. All risk is on the contractor. The contractor will also fight for $ for every changing requirement.
By comparison, in a time & materials contract, the risk is on the government, and changing requirements don't matter much, if you change them, risk is still on the government.
This explains why firm-fixed price is not always the best approach, and sometimes time & materials contracts may make for a more economical acquisition approach - because risk and changing reqs can translate into dollars.
Software has the same problems. An unreasonable expectation of being able to predict the future (except the bits they don't want you to know about), and a lot of whining when we run into unexpected issues.
Haha, nice.
Didn't last time
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/poop-space-revisited-apo...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/nasa-chief-says-cost...
Any contract type where the political leadership can't terminate a contract for cause due to excessive political pressure, or is forced into paying through the nose, is untenable.
The solution for that is not Firm Fixed Price or T&M contracts - but instead larger budgets and also multiple award contracts where you have simultaneous efforts competing against each other. When there are 5 options, all having company skin in the game, all as viable paths forward, and 1 option loses out, terminating for cause, enriching the other 4, no harm no foul.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/weirdly-a-nasa-officia...
The issue is that incentives absolutely aren't aligned. The moment Boeing thinks it has achieved a certain part of the contract but NASA does not you have a huge problem on your hand where one side will try to get work done for free and the other has absolutely zero interest as they are not getting paid.
If cost overruns are too great Boeing might also (depending on the contract) choose to withdraw, as the continuing development cost will be greater than any penalties from the contract.
Who besides Spacex or ULA can reasonably bid for it? Or are you also looking at foreign options?
It might not be Starliner but it seems like it'd be good to keep ULA in the game, just to make sure that Spacex is not the only option.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/nasa-will-pay-boeing...
RIP Boeing.
As for the 2x part... it's cause their bid was 2x what SpaceX bid itself. And both got their bids accepted.
Mostly.
NASA did just give Boeing extra money for some pretty dubious reasons.
> NASA instead requested Boeing “propose prices for additional flexibilities to fill an anticipated crew access gap, including shortening its lead times for rocket and spacecraft production,” the report states. After what OIG described as “prolonged negotiations,” NASA agreed to pay Boeing an additional $287.2 million for those mission flexibilities.
> The OIG report concluded that much of those payments were not necessary, since there were other methods to provide schedule flexibility to mitigate gaps in crew access to the station. The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
> OIG also criticized NASA for not giving SpaceX, the other company with a commercial crew contract, an opportunity for offering its own proposal to address any gap in crew access to the ISS. “In our judgment, contacting both providers would have been a prudent approach to maximize the Agency’s options while also ensuring fairness,” the report concluded.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-criticizes-addi...
Actually, a multiple award approach for a very high risk, technically challenging widget makes perfect sense, and is the same thing seen for similarly challenging weapon systems e.g. the Advanced Tactical Fighter F-22 vs F-23 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/americas-f-23-ste...
> The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
This looks like Boeing was doing some horse trading that could have been pretty financially risky particularly considering the value of money.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
Sometimes when thinking about the Industrial Base of the United States, there is a good rationale for keeping an incumbent's design & engineering capabilities active, while bringing competition to the table and potentially displacing it with a more agile competitor.
If truly getting the best and most efficient designs out there was the true goal, there should have been more awards, and for funded development to enable a greater diversity of competitors with designs being put forth.
There lots of more relevant and important technologies that need more funding.
The CommercialCrew program was not done for research, it was trying to solving a particular problem at the time and do it fast and efficently.
If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do it.
SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA.
It is clear that the longterm for SpaceX, and their competitors, is going way past mere launch services (as complex as those are) to cis-lunar and interplanetary missions.
Getting a healthy ecosystem with robust competitors is just the start. NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
https://www.space.com/nasa-funding-moon-power-exploration-te...
No. The CRS missions were displacing Arianespace. The CommercialCrew flights were displacing Russia. Commercial came from Proton, Soyuz and Ariane 5. Only military came from ULA.
> NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
Yes, its called the Clips program. IT shouldn't be part of CC.
OK.
I'm not really sure what your point is. NASA gives out contracts to new companies all the time. And the award was in a firm, fixed-price contract.
The difference between that and the previous example is that NASA had already awarded Boeing money for CCtCap (the commercial crew contract). And then they just decided to give them more money, for what can charitably described as bad reasons.
1. COTS was a milestone based, firm, fixed-price contract. Which means that NASA didn't have to pay for work that didn't get done. If SpaceX failed at development, NASA could have chosen a different company and retained most of the money.
Which actually happened - Rocketplane Kistler basically did just that. And NASA replaced them with Orbital Sciences.
2. Established companies like Boeing and Arianespace entered bids and NASA seemed to think those bids were worse than the eventual winners.
3. The program largely worked - SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were successful at delivering cargo to the ISS. And all indications are that Sierra Nevada will be successful soon.
4. It was way less expensive than the traditional NASA route.
> In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 development costs were on the order of US$300 million. NASA estimated development costs of US$3.6 billion had a traditional cost-plus contract approach been used. A 2011 NASA report "estimated that it would have cost the agency about US$4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes" while "a more commercial development" approach might have allowed the agency to pay only US$1.7 billion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
They do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pad_Abort_Test
(It might even be less heat impact to the capsule than the Dragon-style rockets, as the hot spent rocket remains on the capsule; Apollo-style abort towers jettison.)
Boeing though has so many government contracts that are used so often for other projects you can’t shut down so you are correct.
Which means overruling Citizens United and campaign funding reform.
What gets in the way is that the US has several replacement space station programs in the works while Russia knows very well that they almost definitely can't get a comparable replacement station up with how hollowed out their industry is.
Plus, since the start of the war, NASA has been investigating options for taking over the tasks the Russian side of the station handles with the various supply vehicles just in case.
However, that does bring to mind something I never thought about. There is talk of privatizing ISS since NASA doesn't want to continue funding it. How do you privatize something made by multiple nations? Or is that precisely why the privatization isn't taken seriously?
The PRC is banned from the ISS, due to NASA being legally forbidden from dealing with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment#History
The talk about private space stations isn't really about privatizing the existing ISS. There are private trips to there every once in a while (required to be led by any former astronaut at the ISS though).
Besides that maybe you're thinking of Axiom's space station, which is intended to have modules docking to the American side of the station and gradually building off of it until their modules can handle being independent, at which point the ISS modules would be disconnected and deorbited, leaving their private space station on its own.
The orbit raising has been performed by the Progress resupply vehicles from Russia and Shuttle and other vehicles from the US. As of 2018 the Cygnus resupply vehicle from the US was capable of performing the orbit raising mission.
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
https://www.space.com/41172-cygnus-leaves-space-station-orbi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_space_stati...
Non of those companies will invest billions on their own. All of those companies investment is predicated on NASA support.
Do you really believe Northrop Grumman will invest billions of its own money?
The Startups are to small an inexperienced.
And Bezos has already said they will not do this unless they get NASA investment.
To just link to a bunch 'commercial' stations is missing the point. These concept exists because NASA has announced they will fund multiple 'commercial' station. But unfortunately Congress has not given NASA the budget for these.
That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.
Ok, let’s break this down from the start. Russia has launched 10 space stations. The ISS was built using modules that were built for the Mir-2 station. The ISS was built on top of Russian modules.
Meanwhile, NASA wasn’t even able to fly their own astronauts to the ISS for a decade until Musk stepped in.
Russia has also demonstrated that they continue to have this capability as they added the first expansion to the ISS in over two decades recently.
I would hazard a guess that Russia’s capability in this area is much more… capable than the US at this time. They are also far more likely to be able to come to a collaboration agreement with china than the US is at this time. They also helped india kickstart their space program recently.
In conclusion: Russia bad? Maybe. But they weren’t stupid enough to outsource their manufacturing and allow the loss of institutional knowledge that the US has.
This can be seen from how many next generation rockets, rocket engines and crewed vehicles they've announced over the years which have never really ended up amounting to much. For instance, the timeline on Orel makes Orion seem like a speedy development.
Finally, while the US did make that mistake at first, they've very obviously more than recovered that knowledge considering how many different engines, launch vehicles, spacecraft etc are in actual (as in having working hardware to show and not just mockups and promises) development by several different American companies.
Plus, much of the former Soviet space program can be attributed just as much to Ukraine, where a lot of the R&D happened ;)
Under Borisov's management there are rumors that they are building a new satellite factory that should be starting production soon.
And realistically, let's not forget that the US has always significantly lagged Russia in this field. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip they would not have been competitive at all.
>Ukraine
Let's be honest here: Ukraine has existed as a state for less than 40 years in it's entire history. The geographic location of current Ukraine has nothing to do with the accomplishments of the former USSR. This is evidenced by the complete and utter lack of any accomplishment in the field by Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.
Side note: Gotta love this tweet threatening Musk for praising the Russian space program: https://twitter.com/KristiTalmadge/status/110375176440949555...
Antares used a pair of Russian RD-181 engines. The first stage was built in Ukraine (Dnipro). This sort of cooperation is basically dead.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/denied-atacms-ukraine-says-it-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/09/its-simple-and...
Surface to air: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/07/24/the-ukraini...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrim-2
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva
> Some of the most unique missions clearly don't need multiple capabilities in this country, and if we talk about fair and level competition, is it two companies, is it three companies, is it four companies? When does it stop, and how do you limit other companies from wanting to participate, and taking a niche of the of the product?
This was the same hearing in which Gass gave a last ditch defense of Russian engines, and fought Musk in favor of cost-plus and ULA's ~$800m/y subsidy for existing.
Even the people that follow newspace probably normally don't realize just how rotten through the industry and its governance had become.
The fascinating thing is that the lack of competition allowed the space launch industry to switch from "invent" mode to "monetize" mode way too early. It is also what makes the Starship work both more credible and more interesting. There are a lot of technical problems to work through on Starship between now and it being as reliable as say Falcon is, but if (when?) they get there, the ability to put 100 tons into LEO for just the cost of the propellant and some depreciation on the vehicle? That really changes the economics of having things in space in a way that is hard for folks to imagine.
If the only capability is incredibly expensive and highly reliable, no demand that only works under cheaper and relaxed reliability exists.
Luckily, the market's caught up pretty quickly.
One of the things I've always looked for in hiring people is the ability to "unconstrain" ones thinking by "rules." Those are the kinds of people who can think about a world where we have a technology to say, "nullify gravity", and what impact that might have on what we do or how we do it. Constrained thinkers will say, "There is no way to 'nullify' gravity so it isn't worth wasting any time thinking about what we could do if we could."
This capability shows me someone who is able to step into a different frame of reference with their reasoning skills intact and sharp. As a result, when there is an "unexpected" discovery or event, they waste little time in cognitive dissonance says "This can't be happening" or "That isn't possible what I'm seeing" and instead jump right to "Hmm if we can do that then <x>, <y>, and <z> could be done too!"
There are a lot of things to dislike Elon for, but one thing that he shares with Steve Jobs is if he believes a thing he is "all in". Sometimes it takes that to get to the other side of an "unthinkable" change.
Its also this kind of thinking that gets people into trouble ie. completely destroying a working codebase because one only thinks in first principles and cannot map human factors(which are inherently too complex to reason mathematically) onto this other plane of thinking.
There needs to be a balance between the unconstrained dreamer and the practical realist.
Steve Jobs had a group of trusted confidants (Tim Cook, Ive and the other leaders) to help reel him back to reality from time to time.
You could argue that Bill Gates had Ballmer to help keep in him check.
It's worth a case study - why didn't they try to pay Gwynne Shotwell 10x more + CEO role + (M\B)illions worth of stocks? Even if they did, why didn't she accept? She would certainly have turned their fortunes around.
As a Washington state resident that used to be proud of Boeing, now days, I just despise them. I work with lots of fine ex Boeing engineers at my current place of work. I feel for all of the fine individuals that still work at Boeing, but other wise, I wish them the same death I wish on IBM now days.
No "Rest In Peace" from me. More of "Don't let the door hit you..." feeling.
There is some pretty horrific anti-Boeing spin.
> Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time.
> Asked whether Starliner might be able to launch this year, Stich did not offer a concrete timetable. "We're not really ready to talk about a launch opportunity yet," he said. "We're going to work the technical issues first, and then we'll sit down with the Boeing team when the time is right and pick a launch target."
Reasonable and responsible as a response. However, Ars spins that response into:
> Such an answer suggests that Starliner's launch on an Atlas V rocket ... may very well slip into 2024.
I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
> Given the ongoing delays, it is now possible that Crew-9 flies next fall, before Boeing's first operational mission, Starliner-1.
Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
All 100% speculation. The "ongoing delays" in this context are "in June, Boeing announced that it would push back the July launch".
I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
Ars (and its Space editor, Eric Berger, who has written books about SpaceX) are pretty heavy proponents of SpaceX (which I generally am too, despite being less enthusiastic about its leader), and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.
> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
Atlas V . . . is America's longest-serving active rocket. In August 2021, ULA announced that Atlas V would be retired, and all 29 remaining launches had been sold.[ As of 10 November 2022, 19 launches remain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
The "brand new space vehicle" is the Starliner.
> that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the "soft links" in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft
source: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/06/twis-20230602/#more-...
So it gets 50% of your trust, then?
> The company, which is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security, was formed in December 2006.
Boeing announced in May 2016 that their first crewed flight would be delayed to 2018 due to issues related to Starliner's Atlas V N22 launch vehicle. [0]
Starliner's problem isn't delays--it is a failed program. The only thing delayed is terminating the program and selling those high value but soon to depreciate Atlas V boosts to something worth doing. (7 of 29 remaining Atlas V (as of 2022) are allocated to Starliner. To get past 7 requires a whole new integration/test/certification for Starliner.)
Each contract required four successful demonstrations to achieve human rating for the system: pad abort, uncrewed orbital test, launch abort, and crewed orbital test. [0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2
Kinda new, because it has seen 2 flights, of which 1 a mission failure (failed to insert into target orbit due to software issues, several other issues identified hours before a potential hard mission failure), and the other an uncrewed test flight.
The comments section of any Ars Starliner article is a must-read for me. These guys were devout Boeing haters and would endlessly praise SpaceX - that is, until Elon become public enemy #1 last year and they suddenly and abruptly shifted their hate and derision the other way. Not a single independent thought on that entire forum, unless you sort by most critical and painstakingly weed through the hidden comments. The articles are crafted to be red meat for their core readership. At least The Register is unashamedly a tabloid and doesn't pretend they're not. Interesting to see how they spin this.
Richard Branson is a billionaire who tried to do spaceflight long before Elon and Virgin Galactic hasn't launched anything useful (before SpaceX) as far as I know. If someone thinks a suborbital flight is impressive I highly recommend them to play KSP and find out how easy that is compared to getting into orbit.
edit: they have reached orbit; I stopped following Virgin after it became clear they can't do the job https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LauncherOne
So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything.
It takes more than a pile of money to run a successful space program and how nobody can see that by now is beyond me.
I think the contrast between Musk's SpaceX and Twitter experiences is largely down to whether the organization grew up around Musk. SpaceX has an immune system built up for the nutty stuff, from Gwynne Shotwell on down. Twitter got thrown into the deep end with zero staff powerful enough or with the experience to do the post-idea cleanup work.
It's a huge mistake to say "Elon had nothing to do with SpaceX's success". It's also a huge mistake to say "SpaceX's success means Musk's Twitter plans are good".
SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.
Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.
SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.
IIRC when FH had turned out to be harder than expected and not really all that useful due to F9's increased performance, Elon had wanted to cancel it, but Gwynne insisted that it stay because they had already sold it to customers and dropping projects like that would be bad for business.
From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.
How Branson shuffles money around between VG and VO is irrelevant if the goal is getting into space and the name of the company matters even less.
It's insane that they insist on and advertise being manually controlled by humans as a selling point.
> But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
A few month delay? It was originally supposed to fly in 2017. with Crews in 2020.
Hell, the launch article for Crew-1 (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-t...) literally did not once mention that that launch was delayed, let alone 3 separate year+ delays. Just about SpaceX "saving" NASA from "wandering around in the wilderness with no access to space".
SpaceX is at Crew 7, Starliner isn't even close to Starliner-1
That's only true if you assume SpaceX strictly allocated budgets per program and that no revenue from their other missions have gone to the crewed flight programs.
I'm not saying Spaceliner is a success, or that there are arguments to be made about each company's approach (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
None of that removes the fairly evident bias that Ars can be counted on to spin anything SpaceX in a positive manner (a la ignoring years of delays to talk of SpaceX saving the day for NASA, while a refusal to commit to a launch date following a just discovered issue for Boeing immediately implies more years of delays).
It Eric Berger, not "Ars". And he absolutly did report on all the SpaceX delays. After the testing explosion he even said SpaceX might be behind. Stop spreading your conspircy threory nonsense.
The Crew-1 delay was three years ago. Why would he mention it in this article?
> spins a lack of a confirmed updated launch date less than three weeks after discovery of issues into a delay that will approach 2025
Reasonable, given how it's gone so far. They've yet another parachute issue, and accidentally used "hundreds of feet" of flammable tape.
> "perhaps even after Crew-9", which is hilarious given that even Crew-8 doesn't have a launch date other than towards the middle of next year, and Crew-7 is currently facing new delays
Crew-9 in 2024 is hardly an unreasonable assumption. Crew-8 is scheduled NET February 2024, not "middle of next year". Crew-7 is facing a two day delay, because of another launch. https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-7-astronaut-launch-delay-a...
Pretending that's relevant in assessing Starliner's multi-year delays is nutty.
The Crew-1 delays were not mentioned once in the article where Crew-1 actually launched - he just spent the article patting SpaceX on the back for saving NASA.
Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays. And speculating that Starliner may not even launch until after Crew-9, when Crew-8 isn't even announced, but will be mid 2024 at the earliest, and that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days, but "because of another launch" - that other launch being a SpaceX launch that was delayed.
However you spin it, this journalist has a near allergic avoidance of the word "delay" when it comes to SpaceX, and can't wait to spin Boeing delays into worst case scenarios that are entirely speculation. There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
The article about Boeing finally getting their crewed test done is in the future, so it's a little odd to be mad at a slight that hasn't yet happened.
> Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays.
Yes, the article about the delays is about the delays. Why is this surprising?
> that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days
If you're going to point out two-day delays, Berger's pointing out two year delays seems eminently reasonable. When they eventually do fly crew, a "after years of delays and additional test flights at Boeing's expense" is probably warranted in the article.
> There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
The last Starliner delay was nine months long. Crew-9 beating the Boe CFT is entirely possible. SpaceX and Boeing both had their first orbital tests in 2019, but SpaceX has flown eight NASA crewed flights (and three commercial) since then to Boeing's zero.
One of these programs is currently troubled, the other has hit its goals and won extra contracted flights. You really can't wish these facts away, and a journalist would be goofy to ignore the difference.
> less than three weeks after discovery of issues
It has been much longer then 3 weeks.
> which is hilarious
Eric Berger has a very good track record when talking about delays. He usually has information from inside the industry. I'm gone go with they guy that has predicted correctly over and over and over again the last 10 years.
I don't really care if you think it's 'hilarious'.
Dragon is on regular cadence, short term delays of one doesn't necessarily even mean that the launches after that will be delayed to.
Yet SpaceX is still cheaper despite those damaged barges and craters. And that's really all there is to those, a cost element. It would be different if they had left smoking corpses but they haven't.
They do really do something right.
Partial mission success gets them a paycheck, but it would be interesting to look at their financials and see if they lost money on those missions.
> and the situation in Russia
Presumably you mean the Ukraine invasion, which had zero bearing on this, given that it happened nearly a year and a half later...
I’m not sure how you can say the Ukraine invasion has zero bearing on the “NASA…having no access to space”. Given starliner is a dumpster fire and NASA would not be able to reliably count on Soyuz for access to ISS, it was a remarkably prescient statement. Even if Russia hadn’t invaded in 2020 it was obvious that NASA having its own capability to get to ISS was a strategic priority, that was only achieved by SpaceX.
The hubub is not about the few more months of delay just anounced.
The starliner and the dragon 2 started development around the same time to deliver about the same thing. The first crewed dragon 2 launched in 16 November 2020. It is not about the months of delay, but the years.
“On September 16, 2014, NASA chose Boeing (Starliner) and SpaceX (Crew Dragon) as the two companies to be funded to develop systems to transport U.S. government crews to and from the International Space Station.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
The pad abort test resulted in a parachute not working - they forgot a pin. https://spacenews.com/missing-pin-blamed-for-boeing-pad-abor...
The first orbital test failed to reach the ISS because it accidentally burned too much propellant. A second error nearly made it burn up on reentry and had to be fixed in orbit.
The second orbital test failed to launch because the craft's valves couldn't handle humidity (despite being designed to launch from Florida). When it finally went (after a complete rebuild of those valves), multiple thrusters from two different systems failed in orbit.
The third orbital test - the first crewed - has been now indefinitely delayed.
It is well behind schedule.
They had an initial failure, and 1 delayed but successful mission. The 3rd mission is again delayed, that’s fairly normal for manned spacecraft. Rocket science is hard, news at 11…
And again, Starliner's third attempt is now indefinitely delayed for a rebuild of critical systems.
"largely delays in funding not just the actual program" is simply not the truth.
> is simply not the truth.
Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays, just using their initial announcement date let alone when funding was actually provided. That’s just simple math.
There's a major difference between internal tests intended to discover problems and "we think everything's good, NASA, can we send it to the ISS?" tests intended to show everything's working.
> Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays
Sure. Add on additional years worth of failed tests on the actual production vehicle and you get the $1.1B in the article. Boe-OFT was now nearly four years ago.
The entire point of spending that much money was to discover problems. As to your “sure” if admit Boeings delays are less than half of total delays, that sounds like you agree with me.
Anyway, Dragon 2 as an iteration of an existing platform was by far the lower risk option. But, that’s a completely separate question.
Plenty of things were updated like IDSS, though that’s an evolution of the old docking standard etc etc. But in the end the unmanned dragon 2 is using the same Falcon 9 rocket, on literally the same mission. SpaceX even called it extended dragon in several places. The crewed version of Dragon 2 is shares most of its design though with abort thrusters, life support, etc.
Anybody who is guaranteed a job with a decent salary for life and a great retirement plan is not incentivized to perform except by some personal drive. Anybody who wants onto the gravy train is motivated to do whatever work it takes to get a seat at that table. And they are motivated to do it as fast as possible.
It is not wrong to prioritize safety over speed. But you can use the safety excuse to drag things out for as long as people are willing to pay you without producing results. While space travel risks involve the obvious threat to human life, those risks can be generalized like any other risk. Usually, the lower the risk, the lower the reward. Unless there is something interfering. Interference that manipulates the risk/reward ratio often has the smell of corruption in the minds of many people.
Vs. Boeing still has not finish assembling a Starliner capsule that meets NASA's safety spec's. Right now, "speculation" is saying that Boeing will ever successfully fly a Starliner mission.
Keep in mind that Boeing was awarded $4.2B, compared to $2.9B for SpaceX, for the same number of flights. Not to mention that NASA was accused of favor treatment for Boeing during the development phase - See What we found section of [0]
> Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
Such is an ignorant take. The rotation of ISS mission is currently 6 months, so there are always two missions a year, in the Spring and the Fall, barring extraordinary circumstance such as with Soyuz MS-10. Crew-8 will fly in the Spring, to be followed by the first Starliner operational flight. However if Starliner upcoming test flight continue to be delayed it's entirely possible that Crew 9 will fly instead.
> I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
It's not Ars' framing. It's common knowledge - [1], and reported by Boeing itself - [2]
Boeing on Wednesday reported a $257 million charge in the second quarter for its Starliner astronaut spacecraft program, bringing the program’s to-date overrun costs to $1.5 billion as delays continue.
The aerospace giant blamed the charge on its decision last month to indefinitely delay the first crewed Starliner launch.
> and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.
The article is very short. Everyone should read and judge for themselves. I think it's mostly matter of fact without sensational takes. Can't say the same about your post (horrific anti-Boeing/reeks/hilarious).
[0] - https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-005.pdf [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/26/boeing-has-lost-1point5-bill... [2] - https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2023-07-26-Boeing-Reports-Secon...
Palmer Lucky actually started a defense company after seeing just how inefficient and bloated those big companies were, and is already worth 10 billion! Highly recommend watching this interview he had about the future of all this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-sD2FTjSaw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2#Crew_Dragon_fl...
It isn't all billionaires but they are part of the picture as it is probably around $55 million per seat for orbital flights though the exact numbers are not disclosed.
Axiom's last mission had two Saudi astronauts (Saudi airforce captain and a biomedical scientist) funded by their government.
The next Axiom mission will be flying astronauts for the Turkish space agency(air force colonel), Italian defence force (test pilot) and Swedish space agency/ESA (test pilot, esa astronaut) as well as their Axiom commander who is a legendary ex-NASA astronaut.
Even the upcoming Polaris Dawn which is funded by billionaire Isaacman will have two SpaceX lead operations engineers and an ex-USAF fighter pilot onboard and Isaacman is a respectable pilot himself. They are going to be pushing private spaceflight to new limits.
It is depressing to work for a company that seems immune to wasting $billions$ and countless human resources wandering around lost.
When there are no consequences for failure there can be an amazing culture of innovation. There can also be a dumbfounding culture of negligence and mismanagement. Sometimes we only distinguish between the two based on survivorship bias.
And the are continuing to build it not because of innovation but rather because it would be an utter and complete embarassment for them to give up. They would lose all credibility as a space contractor and would have little chance to ever bid for another big NASA project again.
Whoever it was in NASA that got that into the contract deserves a promotion
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Obviously he's not hitting 100%, but you can't deny his companies are achieving immensely more than anyone ever thought possible.
If I could take Elon's ratio of "I said it would work vs. it's real and it does", I would, and so would any sane person.
which model S being good, falcon 9 working etc, that is all it takes. basic physics napkin math.
anything with nuance (self driving) or human emotions in play (twitter), and he is the same as any boomer uncle complaining about kids these days
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1661441658473570304?s=46...
Raptor improved thrust:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1678276840740343808?s=46...
Raptor 2 improved thrust:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657249739925258240?s=46...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1661441658473570304?s=46...
Love the guy or hate the guy, but on SpaceX numbers (other than timelines), he’s been spot on.
Exactly, it's not rocket science. Oh, wait, it actually is.
Executing it is then one of the hardest things people can do but SpaceX had all the best people at the time.
And yet Tesla and SpaceX and now wiping the floor with their competitors.
If it was really so "basic", why didn't those other multi-billion dollar companies do what Tesla and SpaceX are doing?
I want to be optimistic too, but you're missing Falcon 9s worth of broken Elon promises.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but certainly a more complete: https://elonmusk.today I recommend starting from the bottom.
I'll just say that if he were a baseball player, he would be a pretty bad one. The odds that an Elon prediction pans out are fairly bad. If a bookie were available, you'd want to take the under on every single one.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You may not owe Elons better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882951.
Allegedly the development of the F35 cost about $35 billion according to one 2020 study. (Which I think was estimated at the start to about $400 million in non-inflation adjusted dollars)
If I look at it through that frame, spending $1.1B on developing a rocket seems ok (I Know they are not done so the cost will keep rising)
This is about developing and building Starliner spacecraft, putting them on Atlas V rockets, and after successful acceptance tests putting people in them to fly them to and from the ISS.
How does the craft get built and you just discover this now?