> the [Boeing] spokesperson said. "A fixed price contract offers little flexibility for solving hard problems that are common in new product and capability development."
Who is convinced by this argument given SpaceX’s successful crew dragon program these past 4 years in the same fixed price environment? Sure, the article acknowledges the cargo dragon program gave them a head start to some extent, but had zero experience with human rated craft, and they also got much less cash.
> Who is convinced by this argument given SpaceX’s successful crew dragon program these past 4 years in the same fixed price environment?
The argument is correct, it's just that Elon Musk has balls of steel, an ego the size of Jupiter, and a few billion dollars of his own money burning a hole in his pocket. So he rolled the dice and won. But only barely. He was one launch failure away from bankruptcy at one point.
> Elon Musk… rolled the dice and won. But only barely.
> He was one launch failure away from bankruptcy at one point.
That was the Dragon 1 back in 2008, years before Commercial Crew and during the company’s scrappy startup phase. SpaceX has since emerged as the launch leader in the world. The idea that they only just scraped it together for commercial crew is to ignore hundreds of Falcon 9 launches with a world-class reliability and now a totally unprecedented launch cadence. It’s a total nonsense argument.
I didn't mean to imply that he rolled the dice with Crew, but that he rolled the dice with SpaceX in general. By the time Crew came along you are right, they had already surpassed Boeing in terms of engineering know-how. (The fact that Boeing more or less unilaterally disarmed by dismantling their engineering culture during that time didn't hurt either.)
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] threadWho is convinced by this argument given SpaceX’s successful crew dragon program these past 4 years in the same fixed price environment? Sure, the article acknowledges the cargo dragon program gave them a head start to some extent, but had zero experience with human rated craft, and they also got much less cash.
The argument is correct, it's just that Elon Musk has balls of steel, an ego the size of Jupiter, and a few billion dollars of his own money burning a hole in his pocket. So he rolled the dice and won. But only barely. He was one launch failure away from bankruptcy at one point.
> He was one launch failure away from bankruptcy at one point.
That was the Dragon 1 back in 2008, years before Commercial Crew and during the company’s scrappy startup phase. SpaceX has since emerged as the launch leader in the world. The idea that they only just scraped it together for commercial crew is to ignore hundreds of Falcon 9 launches with a world-class reliability and now a totally unprecedented launch cadence. It’s a total nonsense argument.