I'm guessing if the ISS was no longer able to sustain life support, Starliner would be used. Guaranteed loss of life by staying on ISS or having an unknown <100% chance of surviving using Starliner, of course it will be chanced.
I'm not really sure what point your question is attempting to get at
I'm sure the astronauts would much prefer to have a Dragon available, but I don't think NASA's "cleared for human flight" means much. After all, 4% (14/355) of all the astronauts that flew on the space shuttle died when their vehicles exploded.
ISS is huge, and is very unlikely to fail all at once. In a case of a catastrophic failure, they could stay in a less affected part of the station. All life-critical systems on spacecraft are duplicated and triplicated. With the current SpaceX launch capabilities, a rescue Crew Dragon could arrive within days if not hours.
Yes, because NASA and Boeing have been both putting their own spin on the things they say. If you read his threads on X you can get a good idea of what I'm talking about
No, that NASA article is mostly fluff. The original link to the ongoing press conference and Eric Berger's summary of it (https://x.com/SciGuySpace) are better.
If we're going to keep Boeing around because it's in the national security interest to have an American airplane manufacturer, we need to either nationalize it, break it up, or remove the entire leadership class. The company exists at this point for the same reason that Chase bank does: because they cannot fail, because we will not let them. The market structure will not work for this company, at least not the way corporate management is done in 2024, and if I'm the Air Force or any other branch of the US military reliant on Boeing goods, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about my supply of Boeing parts, planes, and armaments right now.
Nothing I'm aware of with Chase's leadership, but they're the largest bank in the US by far by AUM, and that's because they've been the partner of choice for the FDIC & regulators looking to rescue distressed banks. In other words, they're a private corporation being used to fill a role the government deems essential, and consequently probably the safest place on earth to put your money right now, at least with regards to the risk of a bank failure.
(As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of role.)
a better bank would have been Wells Fargo. Chase and JPM are not in the same category they are profit machines with great balance sheets. that's why they swooped in last year during the bank crisis and took over some banks.
Wells Fargo is a better example of criminal vs negligent. Has Boeing verged into criminal? It's not like they were continuously bilking the gov't for all of this, which to me keeps them out of criminal. but of course, IANAL
Yeah, I'm mostly referring to Chase's relationship with the Fed, FDIC, and regulators - they're clearly the bank of choice for rescuing distressed banks, and they're the largest bank in the country by a pretty substantial margin.
You're right about the difference, though - they're stable, well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.
If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a different story, but I think there's been a clear decision made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing yet.
This company needs to be audited, starting at the top. Once a business is considered critical for natural security (Boeing is certainly in this category), it has an obligation to deliver with quality and on time. Boeing is failing and needs recovery.
We should just go ahead and admit that Boeing is a government company, and that's what it takes to be one of the big-3 global commercial aircraft manufacturers these days (Boeing, Airbus, Comac).
Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace everyone.
Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board representation.
Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad company, but make any employee shareholders who are still employed whole ($1 per $1).
Yup. There's no market pressure of note on Boeing, otherwise they'd be even the slightest bit concerned that their planes are falling out of the sky. They exist to turn government contracts into stock buybacks.
It's not true that there's no market pressure on Boeing. It's true that Airbus' production capacity limitations have blunted the impact of the QA issues on Boeing's financial performance, but Boeing is in fact suffering. They've been suffering for at least a year (their net profit margin has been 0 or lower for the last 4 quarters). Their stock price is down ~20% from a year ago, and is down ~35% from their high from just before the Air Alaska incidence.
The problem isn't that management assumed that there would be no market pressure, the problem is that management assumed that engineering and production excellence "just happens". They're not dumb enough to believe that shoddy products won't effect their financial position - they just don't know how to make non-shoddy products while also posting decent financials.
Breaking Boeing up would make it ineffective and likely lead to its failure. You could maybe spin off a couple small divisions, but not more than that. Nationalization is a non-starter in the US - not worth wasting the time and effort to try to make it happen. The only real option is to remove the current leadership, and place the company into Conservatorship to force the new leadership to do the right thing - ideally for at least 10 years, but 5 to 7 years would be the more likely political outcome of such a move.
I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long term, would get on board with this option.
At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe space from which to spread throughout the organization.
It's not clear to me that splitting up Boeing in commercial+business jet, defense, and space would make it more ineffective than its current incarnation? Boeing's ability to purpose build commercial jet frames for defense applications both seems to be... a) not performing well (see KC-46), and also b) not a future growth industry with the focus shifting to the Indo-Pacific and peer conflict (given the vulnerability of these types of platforms).
It's not a technical problem. It's that they need to stay too-big-to-fail, to be able to resist the very aggressive competition of other aircraft manufacturers. If they are broken up, the smaller companies would not be able to compete effectively, and they would also be immediate acquisition targets by largely foreign competitors.
I agree with others here that think they need to be a quasi-government-run company, but in the US that is done through oversight, managing the manager rather than stepping into the management role directly. Of course we have to absolutely gut that awful management with extreme prejudice, to start.
Letting them merge? Boeing and McD were essentially forced to merge by the Department of Defense post cold-war. So were Lockheed and Martin-Marietta, and Northrop with Grumman, etc. It was in the national strategic interest, apparently. Recommended reading: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
I dont blame NASA, who knows what else is wrong with that capsule.
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
There are still some, even many, people there that are doing their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad executive decisions. I’m sure morale there is not great. I don’t feel bad for the executives at all, or the company really, but there are likely some great people that are just getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.
But it's exactly the same at Facebook/Google/Amazon/Palantir and countless of other places, yet people chose to work at those places. Why feel bad for them? They've made their choices, and if they're not happy with those anymore, they can make new choices.
>“between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models,”
If companies voluntarily choose to operate with lower cash reserves and then end up unable to weather hard times or make necessary investments in their products, do they have any fault for what happens next?
Boeings choice to not sufficiently invest in its core products while pumping its stock through buybacks belongs solely to Boeing and Boeing’s board. The impact to their reputation was a predictable and ignored consequence.
In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
> You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple.
Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.
The purpose of being in business is to make more money than you could by putting the money in an interest-bearing account. Another way of saying it is there is no point to operating a business if you cannot make more than the "opportunity cost".
> Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization.
What businesses are in business to do is put cash to work earning more than the opportunity cost, often meaning about 15% ROI.
That certainly is not a microoptimization.
In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
I do something similar with my investments. I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
You're never going to make much money if you aren't willing to take on risk.
Elon Musk at one point was within hours of personal bankruptcy with Tesla when he managed to secure more funding. He's the richest man in the world, and got that way by taking on enormous personal risk.
How wealthy would you be today if you put everything you had into Amazon stock the day of its IPO?
Yes, but the world doesn't work better if everyone maximally leverages their way into every weakly EV-positive (or EV-negative) high volatility play. If everyone is maximally leveraged, any tiny negative disturbance wipes out all wealth.
At some point, you're just hoping to get lucky, and to leave other people (debtors, governments) holding the bill if you don't. This is what people talk about when they criticize others for "privatizing profits, socializing risk."
Back to Boeing: Boeing put up really good numbers by gutting engineering and manufacturing organizations, hoping it would all turn out okay. For awhile it did, but then it didn't.
And it's questionable how much of these costs Boeing is going to bear, because there's a whole lot of talk in policymaking circles about how to keep an important defense manufacturer and top manufacturer alive (through contracts, tariffs, and supportive policy).
A degree of risk is priced into the interest rate. I still have a fiduciary duty to my lenders to not take undue, undisclosed risks. In practice, people get away with this except in the most egregious cases, but that doesn't make it less wrong.
Worse, systemic risk isn't priced into the interest rate, because the government tends to bail out the banks.
Everyone using leverage and betting on things going up forever is a really big part of how you get 2008. A lot of people made a ton of money in the run-up to 2008 (privatized profits); the population as a whole paid the costs (socialized losses).
edit: I wrote "borrowers" above when I meant lenders.
> In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
Getting more of your capital as debt is a microoptimisation (unless there are special circumstances like different tax treatment, and usually even then) - that's the classic Modigliani-Miller result. Holding more cash makes your nominal return on equity lower, but improves your cash position, and unless you push it to the point where you're taking a real risk of actually going bankrupt the two effects balance and your risk-adjusted return is the same.
> I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
Exactly. So it really doesn't make a lot of difference how levered a given company is, because an investor can always make a more or less levered investment in the company - if a company has a lot of cash then an investor can lever up a lot, if a company has a lot of debt that same investor levers less or not at all, and ultimately either way the investor gets the same level of risk and the same return.
> It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Not really - there are all sorts of special treatments for home mortgages (in particular the mortgage interest tax deduction, the most horribly regressive piece of the tax code) that mean you're genuinely disproportionately better off to do one. But it's rare for something like that to apply to corporate borrowing.
Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.
Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you get higher and higher up, you see more and more people whose qualification is political skills and not expertise).
The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
Every organization will have incompetent individuals. A healthy organization is able to remove them; a typical one will blunt their effects; and an unhealthy one will allow them to reproduce themselves and seize power.
We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.
Succession remains an unsolved problem. Seemingly.
I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.
I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?
Neither Nvidia nor Apple have access to a spigot of unconditional cash. Their customers are quite discerning and have alternatives they could switch to.
> Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working.
This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.
Manager's entire job is to provide the organizational support and navigate the organizational challenges to allow the non-manager employees the space to do their job. When we talk about systemic organizational failures, managers are the ones that own that problem and are accountable for the failures.
Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.
I don't think the comment you replied to implies such a black and white distinction. Is it so absurd to suggest that some of the people working on Starliner actually cared, and did the best work they could?
Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.
Except that's capitalism for you. The profit motive means only those willing to put profit (and often very short term profit) ahead of everything else means that only unempathetic assholes (and often psychopaths) end up as leaders of these organisations.
So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.
The problem is management sets the core rules and incentives. And no matter how competent and motivated you are, at some point you either move along or stop caring.
There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.
"Management" is short hand for the Jack Welch wannabe MBA try hards. Not middle management.
From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.
Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.
This isn’t any better. Are you an IC? All you’re probably saying is, “the people that I work with more directly, that share the same organisational context as me, that I personally can relate to, etc are good, and the other ones aren’t”.
I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do it again someplace else. At least I really hope that’s what they meant. You never know on HN.
But wouldn't you say "I feel bad for the people working at X" in that case? And besides, isn't that also a quite strange sentiment?
Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work - look at mission control videos for examples of how excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there’s a lot of disappointment.
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
Interestingly the market for Aerospace engineers is really small. For many of those guys, they could only go work at Airbus or Embraer. Some could potentially get jobs in military with Lockheed or something. Very few may be able to find work with Textron or similar.
> Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any sense.
Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are in the process of getting laid off now!
> Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why?
Because there are people working at Boeing, people like you or me, who poured their heart into the project and the institution sapped their energy away and made their efforts ultimately worse than futile.
There was someone working at Boeing who spent years of their life qualifying those thrusters. They tried their very best. Perhaps they even batted for more testing. Or more analysis. Or perhaps they didn't because they didn't know better, but they still spent their best effort to do a good job.
And when they heard that the engines are acting up they probably felt like a trap door has opened under them. They felt that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Either angry that they haven't caught this in testing, or angry that they haven't approved their request to test more.
Years and years ago they proudly told their mom/girlfriend/drinking buddies that they are working on a beautiful spaceship. And they were very proud of the project. And now all those people have heard that their spaceship is a liability. All that good feeling turned ash in their mouth.
There are people at Boeing who worked very very hard the last few weeks (months?) trying to uncover what is wrong with those thrusters. There are others who spent endless hours in meetings with NASA discussing risks and explaining tests and arguing persuasively that the space ship is fine enough to ride. And it is not really their individual fault that the spaceship is not fine.
And even worse, there are people who spent years of their life designing and building flawless systems. And they did a great job and built their subsystem really really well. Well made, high quality products. Yet nobody will think of their stuff positively because some other subsystem failed.
It is kind of like you are working on a beautiful great pyramid. (FYI pyramids were not built by slaves.) And you work hard, and quarry stone all day, and shape it, and push it and pull it and you really really do your best job. You are really a champ. And you should deserve to celebrate in the sun with your team mates the beautiful pyramid. But unfortunately you are not one of the lucky ones working on Khufu's pyramid, you are on the team which works the second pyramid built for Sneferu. And something is wrong with the plans. Or the foundations, or the site selection. Or the rocks are not strong enough. Nobody really knows but even though you are doing a great job individually the damn thing is collapsing in front of your eyes. And it will be known forever as the "bent pyramid". And it sucks. And you feel bad. And that is sad and we should feel bad for those people.
Are there actually people doing work at Boeing? As far as I can tell they outsource every last thing, retaining only a management hierarchy internally. Elements which were once Boeing are now spun off subcontractors, and machining, assembly, component design, integration - all of these are third party activities.
Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people there have done great work and their collective contributions to the people of the US and world at large is very much appreciated by many (including myself).
It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
They didn’t really try to optimize for maximum profits.
That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.
NASA failed to communicate the seriousness of the issue from the beginning. Their press conference mentioned all the work they've been doing for MONTHS. Who knew? Everyone thought things were 'fine'. Huge huge huge failure by NASA here. They can't be trusted.
The Boeing of today is merely a husk of its former glory. If the U.S. had another viable domestic airplane manufacturer I bet we’d see a lot more pressure on them. That can still happen. I hope it does.
The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80", which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.
Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
Breaking up businesses that are “too big to fail” is good for the economy in the long run, and for defense firms is arguably an issue of national security. It seems to me an incredibly bad idea for a nation to have all of its defense eggs in a single, increasingly fragile basket.
Maybe NASA still wants to get something for the money spent launching Crew 9 and get some science done, not just be a rescue mission. They don't want to cut that mission short.
Sure, if Starliner returns in auto mode successfully, then Boeing will be able to save face, and NASA will be able to take some stock in that. However, if there is a viable alternate option that has a much better track record of working, NASA would potentially not survive as an agency if there was a catastrophic ending to a Starliner return with the astronauts on board.
So from a keep humans safe while still attempting to complete the Starliner mission as much as possible, to me this is the best solution. In fact, it's kind of bonus for Boeing to test the automated return that was not part of the original mission. </spinDocter>
I understood what they were saying about the simulations as that the teflon seemed to have expanded slightly and disrupting the oxidizers input, meaning the thrusters wouldn't work as they should.
Yes, permanent teflon deformation. Problem is, if the deformation observed in ground tests was permanent, why did the ones in space eventually seem to recover?
That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.
Starliner is the capsule, SLS is the rocket. SLS [1] is not a fixed price contract. The government's dumped tens of billions on it already, and continues to throw good money after bad. And the "fixed" price contract for Starliner keeps getting adjusted with NASA giving them hundreds of millions more dollars, allowing them to skip certain qualifying tests, and so on.
You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true. They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8, they will have the plan of coming down on crew 9. The starliner is still functional as well, just the risk is unquantified. Remember NASA requires a risk assessment of 1:270 odds to proceed. Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
>You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true.
Amazing that, even after today's confirmation of what we all expected, there are still those in denial.
>They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8
Yes, lashed to a jury-rigged harness in the cargo department. Right now NASA is in de facto violation of the ironclad rule of always having a seat for everyone aboard ISS, and for about three weeks between Crew 8's departure and Crew 9's arrival, the violation will be even greater.
>Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
As I wrote in the link in the comment that you keep seeing everywhere but never bothered to read:
>NASA has said that in an emergency the astronauts will use Starliner. That is not the same thing as saying that using Starliner (whether in an emergency or not) to return to earth is as safe as using Soyuz or Crew Dragon, and every day the return is delayed (hitting two months very shortly) is additional proof of this.
>Put another way, if there is an emergency on ISS right now, the two astronauts that flew on Starliner have to take Starliner back because there is no alternative. There are no extra seats on Soyuz or Crew Dragon docked there.
and
>In an "ISS explodes tomorrow and there is no Starliner" situation, of course Wilmore and Williams will be strapped in as tightly as possible as cargo in Crew Dragon. The ride might be bumpy, but should be survivable.
>The interesting question is, in an "ISS explodes tomorrow" scenario, does the above still occur? Based on all available reporting the answer would until very recently have been "No; Wilmore and Williams will use Starliner". I am no longer sure that this is the case.
It’s hard not to be cynical these days when almost everything seems to be “maximize every possible drop of profit at the expense of almost anything else.” It seems so short-sighted and instant-gratification-y.
I'm waiting for Boeing to change its name to get away from all of the negativity associated with Boeing. It's the classic move for a company that doesn't really want to change business practices, but need to "start over"
No, it is not an embarrassment. Space is hard, failures do happen often there. There is and will always be a human factor, politics and cost optimizations. Despite that they delivered people to ISS and have a plan B. It is partial success. The problems will eventually be fixed and USA will solidify its leadership in space race by having different launch systems and never again being dependent on rival powers.
I think this is much less embarrassing for NASA than Boeing. NASA outsources their engineering now, and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company. It's going to be very difficult for the world to adjust to the new reality that Boeing is no more. It's an even stranger reality that the company which routinely blows up rockets in pursuit of what everyone believed was impossible just a few years ago is now the clear and obvious choice. I think that's the even bigger story here for me: what Musk has done with SpaceX is nothing short of revolutionary. In hundreds of years people are going to be watching this as a pivotal moment in human development: https://youtu.be/sf4qRY3h_eo?si=fAhcunCLHY803wn7&t=454
It's amazing how many people, whether sympathetic to SpaceX or not, believe that NASA built its previous spacecraft in-house or something. The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
> The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
I think there is a big difference you haven't mentioned.
With Apollo, with the Space Shuttle, with the US components of the ISS, with SLS/Orion – NASA owned the design and made the big design decisions. They hired contractors to do a lot of the grunt work of the engineering – analysing different options, fleshing out high-level designs into detailed designs, etc – but the big picture design decisions were made by NASA. (Or, in the case of SLS, dictated to NASA by Congress.)
By contrast, with Commercial Cargo/Crew and HLS, NASA is just writing the requirements spec and letting the contractors make the big design decisions. And then the contractors have to convince NASA's engineers that the design actually fulfils those requirements. But NASA isn't making decisions like "what fuel should the launch vehicle use"–so long as they can convince NASA that what they are doing meets the requirements spec, the contractor can do almost anything they like. Whereas, on earlier programs, NASA was making the final call on many of those high-level design decisions.
I grew up in Huntsville, AL, in the 60s and the space program was the main business of the city. My father worked for Chrysler Corp. on the Saturn 1B, and most of our neighbors worked for either NASA or one of the many contractors.
imagine if you could go back in the past 20 years and show someone that video. it's science fiction level crazy. im happy and proud that happened in the US and not china or russia, everyone else should be too
>and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company
what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime
This is evidence of the utter failure of constantly pumping money into a dated cartel of prime contractors that have no incentive to do better. I am very thankful we have Elon Musk to be bold enough to enter this impossibly capital heavy market and show a better way. I hope this is the start of a reset on how taxes are funneled to government contractors.
It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.
I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and innovations in space explorations since the space race. Credit where credit is due.
What is SpaceX doing that the Apollo project (or the Soviets, for that matter) wasn't doing 50 years ago. Re-usable booster stages is all I can really think of.
OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a new competitor.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue has been government contracting. That is starting to diversify in the last 2-3 years with more truly private launches and with Starlink, but that's relatively new, and even so government is a very, very large share of revenue.
Many were. I'm not saying this is terrible-- these programs cost too much for private entities to bear all the risk, and most of the programs that SpaceX has gotten funding from have been well-run programs.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
SpaceX is also doing right now what Apollo and the Soviets are not doing right now. That's very important, because they are using modern materials and manufacturing techniques and developing new concepts. If SpaceX (and soon their competitors, hopefully) manage to keep themselves in business (and they might, because of the profit motive, which is enduring, rather than national pride, which comes and goes), there's a fair chance our species might bootstrap its way out of the ancestral gravity well this time around.
Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal, one'd start another eyeball catching internet application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The man being hated on all over the place here that shall not be named.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
Beyond the cost aspect that other commenters have referred to, they're evolving tech. They're the first ones to have a working full-flow staged combustion cycle rocket engine (the Raptor, currently used in the Starship prototypes), something the Soviets tried before and failed. Their Dragon capsule was also a gigantic technological leap relative to the admittedly tried-and-true Soyuz, and it also looks far more comfortable for astronauts than the Soyuz does.
People thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, too.
Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.
P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.
The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.
Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.
> The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires.
You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.
The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X, so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do it!
But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.
I've held many of bags. Some of them all the way to a smoking hole in the ground. But several of the bags turned out to be winners that far outstripped the losses.
I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.
Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.
Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
I do not know how well X is doing as a business, but Musk buying Twitter has certainly helped to wrest it out of the hands of the left and to shift the Overton window. It could well be that to Musk, the political impact is well worth billions of dollars.
I'm curious, how does one buy stock in SpaceX? Is this opportunity only available for wealthy individuals or people who can put down 6-7 figures towards it?
What happens is some big investors buy chunks of stock, and then resell it on a secondary market. So my shares are claims on the big investor's shares, not mine. There's usually a non-trivial minimum, and a hefty fee.
Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble, ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX, but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .
Biggest advancements in launch technology would surely be correct. Scientific research isn’t in their domain and should never be. There’s just too much political influence there.
I recommend reading a biography of Musk and the creation of Tesla. It's abundantly clear neither would exist without Musk. Anyone would want to be called such a "sad loser"!
And what exactly have you accomplished in your life that has bettered others' lives?
Don't get me wrong it's perfectly fine to criticize someone on specific things - however, you are just blanket calling someone you don't know a sad loser... honestly says more about you than him.
oh bugger all, and I'm content with that. I don't think he is though. he just doesn't seem okay. if I were that filthy rich, I'd pay somebody to make sure I'm not coming across as a lunatic, I wouldn't joke about buying a blog and then panic when I can't pull out of the contract. i wouldn't tell advertisers to go fuck themselves and then sue them for not advertising on my blog.
There are lots of nice people in the world who don't do anything much for us. People like Musk, on the other hand, create this world we can enjoy. Consequences matter more than motivations.
You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).
It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.
It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.
Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.
I follow Musk on twitter. I usually get a chuckle from his tweets. It's nice to see a major figure speak his mind rather than the careful pablum filtered through a PR department and read off a teleprompter.
I don't think he has said anything outright. But he has endorsed (coded) antisemitic tweets, he has directly espoused transphobia, and his companies have lost a few lawsuits alleging racist working conditions.
I don't think he himself is racist, but he seems to enjoy hanging out with a lot of racists, and he gives me vibes that he thinks anti-racism is more of a problem than racism.
It is true that Musk endorsed a post which said that Jewish communities have been endorsing anti-white hatred.
There is no doubt that one can easily find many individual Jews, and even groups of Jews, who have endorsed anti-white hatred. However, Jews are prominent in all parts of the political spectrum due probably mainly to their high average level of intellectual ability, so basically anyone could find prominent Jews among their political opponents no matter what sort of politics one has. Some of the most prominent figures who are generally considered far-right in today's Western Overton window, and most definitely are not anti-white, are Jewish. For example, David Horowitz, Curtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu, and many others. Then there is Israel, which in some ways is far-right by modern US standards, and is a place where I imagine the majority of the population both consider themselves white and are not anti-white in the slightest, rather the opposite. The idea that entire broad communities of Jews promote anti-white hatred is not supportable by reality as far as I can tell.
I forgot about that endorsement of his. You make a good point. I am not sure that his endorsement was just a case of misunderstanding on his part rather than revealing a deeper racist sentiment. It could go either way. It is possible that he was just sloppy and interpreted "Jewish communities" to mean "certain groups of Jews", which is what he tried to say when he backtracked from his endorsement later, and it is also possible that he actually dislikes Jewish people in general. But I agree that it is not unlikely that he has at least some underlying anti-Jewish sentiment.
Funnily, I notice that many people who have anti-Jewish sentiment misunderstand what is typically happening when individual Jews express anti-white sentiment. Usually what is happening in such cases is that the person considers himself both white and Jewish, so when he expresses anti-white sentiment it is not as a Jewish person hating on whites, it is actually as a self-hating white hating on whites. I would not be surprised if Jewish whites in the US are more likely to express anti-white sentiment than non-Jewish whites are, since Jewish people in the US tend to be leftist and being a self-hating white person is a very common characteristic of leftist whites, but that does not mean that communities of Jews are anti-white unless you use the word "communities" in a rather non-standard way.
As far as transphobia goes, I am not so sure. Musk seems to be a bad father to his trans child, but I cannot think off the top of my head of any transphobic things that he has said, unless you think that it is transphobic to not consider a trans woman a woman. Which I do not consider transphobic at all. But I might not be aware of some of his statements.
Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.
Right, the public-sector government becomes afraid to take risks for political reasons. On the other hand, the publicly traded private sector over-optimizes for shareholder value, putting the cart of gold before the horse; Boeing.
SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.
There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.
As a (very) small shareholder in SpaceX, I can tell you, it's Elon (and Gwynne's) game, full stop. I would be very surprised to learn an investor has even a tiny bit of influence at SpaceX.
The problem isn't government meddling, but the government creating perverse incentives. Boeing has an extremely strong relationship with the government, which means they get sent endless billions of dollars with quality being only a distant concern. Because it's not like Congress cares about space - NASA is just seen as a convenient jobs/pork medium. So long as money gets redirected to the right people, they're happy. And so maintaining this relationship, and milking it for all it's worth, becomes much more profitable and reliable than trying to compete, innovate, and bring down prices. On the contrary, high prices and long development times just drive even more profit. Most of their contracts have been cost plus where the government pays for all costs and then gives them a fat chunk of profit on top. Even the fixed price contracts tend to end up getting 'adjusted' over time.
Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.
Whether it's in the public or in the private sector, the real problem is a lack of competent leadership. At some point we started respecting the person with the most profitable hustle more than the person showing actual competence and integrity.
The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.
SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
and the government should continue to fund private enterprise for innovation.
much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation
> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
> 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."
> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.
"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."
You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)
> The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been spent yet
Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.
Sure, and if we’re still at ten completed charging stations in a few years, I’m happy to criticize.
I think that’s unlikely.
Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.
Turning Elon Musk into the richest person on earth was a US government project on the same kind of scale as the TVA and Apollo program. It’s actually kinda funny when you think about it.
This is reductive, in the extreme, to the point of being incorrect. SpaceX had to sue to win its first contracts, Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV programs and awards. Whatever success they've had, they have absolutely earned.
the command of critical projects Elon has is unnatural. He builds his massive projects with no permits or regulatory approvals;
see:
- the massive supercomputer in Memphis, no power power approval from TVA and did do an EIA. The city council never new about the project.
- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval
- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval
-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval
and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.
It is undeniable that NASA/NROL/USAF contracts and support benefited spaceX especially early on .
However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .
I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.
No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.
SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .
"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."
Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which achieved orbit without external money, and did that for awfully less money than e.g. Air Force thought possible.
Thanks for the links. I can't find in the article how much DARPA gave SpaceX, in dollars, and the second link talks about payment for the launch, not the grant.
The mission carried a $6.7 million price tag covered by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
How big share of about AFAIK $90 millions spent on Falcon-1 program was from SpaceX investor(s) and how big was from external sources? In other words, how material was that external funding?
I think it stands to reason that if they were nearly bankrupt after flight floor, having to self-fund flights one, two, and three would have definitely bankrupted them.
I think they had money to make up to 4 flights. Looks like they got some money even before the flight 4, but not sure how much compared to their own expenses.
> SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed
DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.
> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...
> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.
We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.
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Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.
The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.
So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.
That's an interesting cost-based criticism of Starship. I hope you are wrong and SpaceX can actually do this profitably, otherwise its potential will be much reduced.
The development is what already being spent... Each flight, after development is complete, will be reusable - that's the plan - and will cost less than $0.1B == 100 millions dollars, if total per-Starship expenses are divided into the total number of that Starship flights. Yes, I hope the eventual costs per flight would be lower, the point is the cost of the program is surely way more than $4B.
It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily commute, but faster.
Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.
OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of the ocean and the sub imploded.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].
From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".
It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.
I'm not demeaning anything, I'm just pointing out that OP's argument makes no sense. There may be other evidence that SpaceX is safe and cost effective, but rich people paying them to go to space is not it.
People have been waiting for that like forever. It may happen, it may not. I spoke to multiple SpaceX employees post Musk twitter and they are as committed as ever with an insane amount of dedication to the cause...so if he does not lose his top talent, the likelihood of screwups like what you are describing seem small.
He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and denouncing conspiracies against him.
This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.
And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.
I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.
It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked their lives and spent several months on cutting edge technology (aka wooden sail
boats) to find “new” land would like to have a word.
It's also a bit poetic in that it took 30-60 days to sail from Europe to the New World. When Mars is aligned with Earth, the travel time will be similar. For example, New Horizons was able to reach Mars in 39 days.
Am I missing something? New Horizons didn’t go to Mars, right?
According to this, it also crossed the orbit of mars 78 days after launch, and at that point, it was closer to earth than mars:
Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to orbit and the moon in the first place.
Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.
I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's.
The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
Wouldn't you wonder why then that it seems, at least according to you, society have went backwards and not forward in this time frame?
"We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's." still applies. Fixing the everyday problem is part of the problem-set to get to the "civilization advancing" goals.
Most economies are not meritocratic and/or capitalist but mixed economies where the state direct good % of gdp towards political goals. in these societies the ones who makes real money are in proximity of the "printing press", usually finance, banking, real estate and generally incumbent megacorps; all actors that can take full advantage of low interest rates & stimulus programs that end up inflating assets (cantillon effect) further devaluing the value of labour. We need real meritocracy and capitalistic competition to put back power int the hand of labour.
But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
You are explaining a symptom of the problem. Solve the underlying problem. If humans are to become a space faring civilization and all the other things this cannot be an insurmountable problem.
>But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
Why is it that society should be expected to solve these extremely difficult problems to go into space and to do all these other sci-fi things but when it comes to the standards of living that humans were once capable of, its "oh what you had were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors".
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. If you want the magic of the future that you see in the comic books get the fundamentals right first!
investing on cutting edge tech has historically been more beneficial to society in large than similar (tiny) amounts in welfare projects. Increasing workers productivity also makes similar levels of taxation less burdensome. lets say you need 10k a year per capita to finance welfare for everyone. if gross income doubles, tax burden halves.
I'm 100% with you about fixing fundamental societal problems first. But we still have to ask why we can't do that anymore with a single breadwinner in a household.
After the super-basics like hunger, homelessness and violent crime, the next item on the list should be this problem of the value of a human's labor (As to how, I'll leave open for discussion). I believe it's been going down since the 1950's because we've transitioned away from manual labor and onto more "knowledge based" labor, of which most people are not keeping up. And of no fault of their own necessarily. We're simultaneously not assisting them with schooling and training, but we're also trying to insulate them from the negative effects of their falling-behind by not promoting a meritocracy.
All fair points. If we could even get an honest dialogue of this issue in the mainstream maybe we could start fixing it. At this point all I hear from politicians are catchphrases and an insane amount of effort has to be undertaken just to get breadcrumbs. I saw this when Bernie Sanders lost the primary, he and his people worked to push the Biden white house to adopt some policies to help working families...it took a lot of effort and we got some tiny wins but with those wins, the elites got hoards of goodies as well.
Since then 500 million people or more have been taken out of poverty. They are competing with you for resources. That's why what was going on in the US in the 50s is no longer possible.
We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.
Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit every week and potentially people every month with the goal to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than a couple decades.
The great accomplishment today isn't reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a bag of screws every six months.
What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-Apollo_proposal).
> What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
I don't buy that the cost was unsustainable. All that money being spent was going directly into the American economy and was stimulating technological development all over the country.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
"Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an understatement. The program missed all of its economical and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit, launch frequency) by a factor of one hundred. It was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system. What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle derived hardware for that exact reason.
Sure, if you define "successful" in the most cynical way possible. I don't disagree with you at all that many projects (even many non-space-related) are just jobs programs masquerading as "progress" or "research" or whatever.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
It explored an idea that ended up being a dead end. But we only know it in hindsight. Decisions need to be judged given the information available at the time. Was there a consensus that shuttle was a bad design at the time? Was it obvious that it will be the case?
Obviously it was not known from the beginning that it would be a dead end. However, engineers have this blind spot for keeping track of bigger-picture objectives, as opposed to technical specifications. If you set out to build a lawn mower, and end up with a rubber duck, this will be deemed a failure. But if you do build the lawn mower, all is good. Even if it costs a million dollars, and all the lawns in the country remain unmowed (except for a handful of government properties). So long as someone is paying for continued development, where's the problem?
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
That's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the time.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
No, the true problem was that the Shuttle program was just a terrible idea. Alternatives (like economical expendable launchers, or even just evolving Saturn) would have been much better.
> Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship deployable stations currently have the problem that the payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in stone yet.
> Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft.
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
Agreed, so far, SpaceX seems to be fine with building more Dragons, I had been assuming they were just refitting the 3 they built initially for the free-flying missions, but turns out they have 5 in service at the moment. Boeing seems to have decided to stop at 2 Starliners, and of course too early to say about fleet size for Dreamchaser.
We also have X-37 the military space plane, although that’s for the military.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
There are lots of spacecraft being built, they just aren't all human rated at the moment. I should mention that I'm including first stages here too because my point is that we have to build the stuff to work the organizational muscles so that we can build more similar stuff which is better performing later.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also:
Astra
ABL
Firefly
Relativity
Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
> we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
Yes indeed. It shows the importance of cultural and political issues in everything. And not least in space flight. See the motivation behind the Apollo programme in the past or who might be part of the next Crew-9 mission in the current situation.
This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.
You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.
The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
>For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically, Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers driven" company.
>At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270 of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or Engineer, it's up to a politician.
>Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run, everybody wins except Musk.
I recommend reading a blow-by-blow account of the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, and compare the long list of failures and coverups with that of the other disasters you mentioned.
Any large disaster will be caused by a long list of failures. Chernobyl was a particularly colossal screw-up (mostly a concatenation of unlucky coincidences, one specific instance of ignorance due to political meddling, and severe human errors eg by Dyatlov).
But it is preposterous to draw conclusions about state vs private enterprises from this N=1 example. There have been many successful government-run megaprojects (Panama Canal, Dutch North Sea dams, China's high-speed-rail). There have been many unsuccessful private ones.
Adjudicating this question would require careful enumeration and analysis across many instances, not just throwing out one example.
McKinsey, for example, states that megaprojects can fail "when big projects cross state or national borders and involve a mix of private and government spending."
So let's get this straight -- the quasi-nationalised Boeing fucks up, a private company steps in to save the day, and your conclusion is that fully nationalising Boeing is the answer?
It’s amazing, isn’t it? These same people complain how everything is broken and that the solution is to double down on it. It’s such a sad state of affairs that the corruption is actively supported by people and they want to feed it more and make it bigger.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
I think a stronger interpretation would be that Boeing's management/corporate culture needs a dramatic shake-up.
Short of letting the company fail completely if left alone, nationalization might well be the best measure out of a long list of not-great measures to shore things up.
Not saying that it's the measure that should be chosen per-se, but as usual it's often better to be pragmatic than ideological at least.
I read "A City on Mars" last year, and it opened my eyes to just hard space travel is. The government constraints on aerospace projects doesn't help. There's a reason SpaceX moves so much faster; they don't have to justify and explain things to taxpayers.
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
> Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.
You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.
NASA officials have previously admitted to applying more oversight to SpaceX than they did to Boeing regarding commercial crew. SpaceX's success is in being self-motivated. The government money is nice, but they want to develop and commercialize the tech anyway and are willing to put their own money into it. As evidence we have all the private Dragon flights, extra capsules built for free-flying missions and their self-developed EVA capability that should launch some time in the coming week.
That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing, which is structured around exploiting cost-plus contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them to make it work with Vulcan.
Don't spacesuits typically have some umbilical connection to the capsule life support systems? It's easy to imagine that these connectors might not be standardized between different capsules, and that sending up a new space suit might be easier than designing an adapter.
927 is a noun at this point to me. Hell so many xkcd could be: 1319, 936, 2347. It's crazy how often referencing a xkcd is the highest signal to noise way of communicating a concept.
A group of professors liked jokes, but got tired of hearing the same ones, so they started numbering them. So instead of telling a joke or funny observation when something happened, they'd say "112" and the others would laugh. or "64", more laughter.
One day they get a new prof on their team and after a few weeks of this number, laugh, number, laugh, during a meeting, the new guy says "-149". There's dead silence for a while. The eldest prof starts laughing, "i've never heard that one!"
Easy to imagine but there are so many details to nail down that it's hard to do in practice.
In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:
"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
I meant it the other way around - incompatibility is the easy-to-imagine default! In absence of some heavily-funded, top-down, NASA-driven standards-development process, no such thing as a standard spacesuit connection should be expected to exist.
Some where recently, I read something about this being an accepted thing. If you have 2 separate capsules that both use the same connector where there is a fault found with the connector, then both capsules are grounded because of the one connector.
I believe that's still the contingency plan in the unlikely event that they have to evacuate the ISS in the period between Starliner undocking and Crew-9 docking.
Yes it is and it is not the first time having such contigency plan.
Quite recently there was a Soyuz with crippled cooling and the contingency plan for the American astronaut that came with it was to evacuate via Dragon if there was an emergency before new Soyuz arrived.
From the press conference today, they stated that there is already an extra SpaceX suit on the ISS. Both astronauts have tried it on, and it fits. They will be bringing an additional empty suit up when Crew launches.
I'm unsure of the specifics of the Dragon capsule, but I know that on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded to each astronaut. You've gotta keep in mind that the capsules are designed for failure scenarios. That includes things like extremely high g force ejections (pushing close to 20g) from a failing rocket, depressurization scenarios, and so on.
It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.
Personally I am amazed just what the focus on safety has achieved.
The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of something else on the day of their flight than from a crash. But still we know how to do better and things improved.
Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a failure and millions of like could have been saved. It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
It actively harmed the environment. Once the thing has been manufactured doing anything less than driving it into the ground is wasting the upfront environmental cost.
Not always. The average car in Wyoming gets driven 24,000 miles a year something getting 12 MPG is burning 2,000 gallons a year directly and another 30% indirectly from manufacture transportation and extraction of oil. That’s a lot for a 5 year old car you could easily be saving 30,000+ gallons of oil.
Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.
Or don't try to regulate 'class 1' into something people don't want to buy.
And FYI those trucks are bigger because you need more volume and moment-arm when building them out of lighter aluminum instead of heavier steel- a direct consequence of CAFE standards.
Starter gives you enough juice to enter the intersection, but engine sputters and you get tboned. Same for not providing enough acceleration/ hp.
Also 1 pedal driving.
Electric cars that outweigh the 'old' 'inefficient' light trucks because batteries are heavy. Harder to stop, more wear on roads. Tires that are designed to extract breaking energy over stopping.
Lithium fires (not cause but much more dangerous result).
Aluminum crush zones in cars not big enough to have crush zones.
Perhaps be generous with your reading of the post and consider the 737 MAX's flight record and fatality rate on a per-mile or per-passenger rate to, say, cars in the United States. Because, by the standards of other transportation methods, even the 737 MAX was very, very safe.
It is a testament to the not-yet-entirely-captured regulatory regime of international flight that the 737 MAX was not considered safe enough.
2 nose dives in 6 months apart within 2 years of first operational flights. This is not safe. This was anything but a testament to the aviation regulatory regime at the time. There was glaringly obvious engineering and procedural issues the FAA and Boeing management waived through.
Is the MAX safe now? After killing over 300 people needlessly, being grounded for 1.5y, and an extensive investigation? Yeah sure, probably.
To be saying what your saying, I think you mustn't of followed Max 8 MCAS debacle very closely, or at all.
First being X months apart isn’t how you calculate risk. What matters is total failure over total flights and there’s a gap between the last crash and the fleet being grounded where that risk kept on going.
~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)
By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.
I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...
Right, exactly. The 737 MAX mess is bad. But the numbers remain on the side of any cleared-to-fly jetliner, even including that situation, compared to almost any other form of transportation except maybe walking.
I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison at all. An elderly person dying of natural causes is a relatively unavoidable, normal death that just happens.
People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.
What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.
> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft
Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.
> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours
We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
> I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.
Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.
Current research shows ~850 people die in the US each year from mechanical failures in cars, but underperforming tires breaks etc contribute to far more.
The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.
The groundings happened after the 2 crashes. When the groundings happened it had the 3rd worst record of then flying large commercial jet aircraft and far from the most dangerous of commercial aircraft of all time.
Tossing that many caveats and still not being the worst aircraft is shocking to many people.
Much worse than other modern aircraft, but there’s many with worse track records globally. The DC-8 and 707 where still in use at the time (https://simpleflying.com/douglas-dc-8-active-2022/) and had worse track records, as did the 720 which just retired. Going back to Concord which retired in the early 2000’s and was far worse. Go back further and the prop aircraft were crazy dangerous.
Again it should be compared to modern aircraft, but this just shows how far we’ve come that the bar has moved this far.
Right, exactly, and this is why this sub-thread is so maddeningly weird. I'm going to compare the 737 MAX's safety record to that of the 737 NG, 777, 787, 757, as well as to Airbus' current-gen 3xx planes. I don't care how it compares to the DC-8 or 707 or 720 because it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever fly on one of those.
And I'm certainly not comparing to the kinds of small planes general aviation pilots fly, and I'm not comparing against other modes of transportation. I already know that I'm safer in a plane (even in a 737 MAX) than in a car, but if I'm choosing to drive, I'm choosing to drive. If I'm choosing to fly, then then the 737 MAX's record, coupled with how poorly Boeing has handled the situation, is a big concern to me.
And I get that, it’s obvious given the choice you pick the safer aircraft. But in a broader context the numbers are so low it’s hard to contemplate.
Currently it’s 2 per 6 million flights. Spend the cost of a flight on Powerball tickets and you’re more likely to with the jackpot than have been on one of those fatal crashes. But people still think of those risks and chances as worth thinking about, which is also why lotteries stick around.
All while the expected value as given by the competition through the A320 Neo series is zero deaths per passenger mile with more than double the fleet size.
I agree it’s bad for modern aircraft, but the Concord would be over 33 crashes per 3 million trips not 1. These numbers are just really low by any objective measurement except modern airline safety standards.
Driving 25 miles in the US is in 2022 was as dangerous on average vs a random 737 Max flight over its history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... In 2022 the average car was driven 14,500 miles or ~600 flights worth of risk, but people still really worry about it.
I don't really get why you insist on continuing to compare the 737 MAX deaths to unrelated, irrelevant other statistics.
The Concorde was a niche aircraft that hasn't flown for over 20 years. Even if it were flying today, I would still consider its safety record as in a completely separate bucket than subsonic commercial airliners.
And I don't care how the 737 MAX compares to driving. I care how it compares to other, similar, commercial aircraft in use today. If I'm going to drive, I drive. If I'm going to fly, I'm going to care about how the plane on my itinerary compares to other planes I could be sitting on with a similar itinerary.
Risk I regularly take are hardly irrelevant to me. I consider this kind of comparison to be foundational to rational behavior.
> completely separate bucket than other subsonic commercial airliners
It didn’t have the worst history compared to other subsonic commercial airliners flying at the time when they grounded it. What it had was the potential for improvement.
If you actually care about safety knowing what the actual most dangerous aircraft are would be the rational decision. And today the 737 Max has had 20x the flights and still the same number of accidents. So if you’re concerned about safety how does it stack up?
Without diving into your bizarre claim about 737 MAX being safe...
> It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature [for cars] etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities. In most crashes, the driver(s) involved are completely sober. Making breathalyzers mandatory in cars would be awful.
> My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities
Your understanding is wrong, “About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher).”
> 737 MAX being safe
At the time it was under 1 accident per 300,000+ flights which is objectively lower than 2 other jets flying at the time. Today with 346 died in 2 crashes but another 200+ people died of medical emergencies on 737 Max flights. That’s the kind of risk people are taking, flying it’s slightly more dangerous than spending that much time sitting at home watching TV.
[EDIT]: apologies, my reading comprehension needs work. I thought you were referring to the 737 MAX, not the 777
What? Do you have a source for the last one? That sounds like corporate propaganda.
It’s well understood AND PROVEN that the MCAS system (which was a system borrowed from decades old military code) was at fault for this incident. Saying it was suicide seems incredibly disrespectful to both pilots…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610
In the article it even states they found the wreckage…
I guess I misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The parent comment mentions the 737 MAX so I assumed that’s what the commenter was referencing.
I have read up on the 777 and yes, I agree it’s incredibly safe statistically (as is the 787). I didn’t realize the commenter was talking about the Malaysia flight either. Apologies to them
Both I reckon. Still, I wonder what the safety record for airplanes was back when the total number of airplane flights ever taken was the same number as today’s total number of space flights ever taken.
It says a lot about the insane dangers of the Space Shuttle in particular. There were several issues with its design that made it an accident waiting to happen, notably its spotty abort coverage on ascent (even worse pre-Challenger) and the exposure of its fragile thermal tiles to debris falling off the external tank. Both issues stem from basic architectural choices and could not easily have been solved without a radical redesign.
I think Dragon 2 could easily be roughly an order of magnitude more reliable than the shuttle, if not more. It has full abort coverage and a TPS that doesn't habitually receive damage from falling debris, and is more robust to impacts besides; and its record so far is exemplary.
Acceptable loss of crew event is like 1 in 250 (can't remember the exact number). They can't quantify the probability of failure, so not putting them in Starliner is the right call.
1-in-270 is overall probability threshold for a 210 day notional ISS stay.
For the journey home from ISS to Earth, the probability threshold is 1-in-1000. Likewise, it is 1-in-1000 for the journey from Earth to ISS.
The riskiest part, which increases the probability from 1-in-500 to 1-in-270, is the ISS stay – the extended stay in space is faced with a continuous risk of micrometeoroid damage.
I think you underestimate space travel to space station.
Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.
But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.
I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.
For years I would fly with Sponge Bob Squarepants themed underwear so in the infinitesimal chance of a catastrophe someone cleaning up the wreck might get a chuckle.
You have to assume Boeings reputation is an issue here. It changes the expected value for the decision maker(s) since the cost of going with Boeing (allowing a crewed return) is so much higher for them personally in the failure case.
This was the only way this could ever play out. After all of Boeing’s last five years, even if 100% unrelated, no bureaucrat anywhere would take that risk. If something goes wrong, you’re the idiot who put the astronauts on a vehicle from a company who has had a long string of recent failures.
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
Not only would you be the bureaucrat who put astronauts on a vehicle with documented problems, you would have done so when a perfectly capable alternative was sitting there able to help.
I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the many billions wasted by companies trying to get close tells you -- not so fast.
I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.
I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.
Kelly had a subversive quality to him that is probably almost impossible to institutionalize; I think it's unusual to find that mixed with some nationalist pride -- in that way, I see him as a product of the war, and the postwar boom.
That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him.
Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
Meme replies should be downvoted, there are other places online where joke comments are a regular occurrence. I like how HN at least tries to force a real discussion and attempts at humor need to be both sincere and not low effort.
You don't have to go through customs on every country you fly over in a regular plane. If I take off in California and fly to Hawaii I leave the airport like I never left the US, even though I've flown over "international" waters and have left the US' exclusive economic zone. I probably don't get a break if I'm in the air over Canada on the way to Alaska when it turns April 15th. If I take off from the US, orbit the earth a bunch on Tax Day, then land in the US was I "out of the country?" It _seems_ obvious but you did but you could potentially argue against it.
OTOH, if you leave US contiguous waters by boat and sit out in international waters for the month of April you have certainly left the country, even if you never entered another country.
The government forces HN to turn into Reddit: everyone has to post vacuous banter comments until you file. (edit: the post I am replying to was the top comment at the time, for about an hour)
edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone else to file your taxes for you, right?
Yes of course those exist, and the other thing is that the US doesn’t jail people for failing to file a tax return. If you owe, you get a fine, and if you don’t pay the fine they seize assets or garnish wages or whatnot. Usually takes years for this to happen. If you don’t owe, they’re happy to keep your refund til you get around to claiming it later.
This actually happened on Apollo 13. Backup pilot Jack Swigert was assigned to Apollo 13 two days before launch because the expected pilot, Mattingly, had been potentially exposed to rubella. The flight launched on April 11, just a few days before the April 15 tax deadline and Swigert realized in flight that he had forgotten to file his taxes. Flight controllers thought it was a joke but Swigert was serious: "It ain't too funny. Things kind of happened real fast down there and I do need an extension. I may be spending time in another quarantine besides the one that they're planning for me." (I.e. besides the 21-day astronaut quarantine, he might end up in prison.)
The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")
Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.
>"legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States."
That gave me a good laugh. Shouldn't it definitely count? You're zipping over every country on earth while you're in orbit so you definitely left!
But if you take off and land in the US, did you _really_ leave? You don't go through customs and immigration for every country you fly over when you're in an airplane, and generally aren't legally considered to have "visited" them. So, wow, good question.
I wonder if the astronauts get some type of extra-pay for the time when they are in space. It feels they they should. If that's the case, these 2 astronauts got quite lucky. They were supposed to stay only a few days in orbit, and they end up staying a few months.
778 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadBut if there are no further incidents it may not end up with such a bad Carfax after all ;)
"NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew"
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
@dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current one?
https://www.adastraspace.com/p/boeing-spacex-spacesuits-comp...
I'm not really sure what point your question is attempting to get at
This one is from yesterday, maybe it will receive an update? https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/as-nasa-nears-major-de...
I don't have a positive opinion of Ars, but he's absolutely one of the best sources for space news and reporting.
(As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of role.)
You're right about the difference, though - they're stable, well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.
If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a different story, but I think there's been a clear decision made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing yet.
Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace everyone.
Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board representation.
Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad company, but make any employee shareholders who are still employed whole ($1 per $1).
The problem isn't that management assumed that there would be no market pressure, the problem is that management assumed that engineering and production excellence "just happens". They're not dumb enough to believe that shoddy products won't effect their financial position - they just don't know how to make non-shoddy products while also posting decent financials.
I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long term, would get on board with this option.
At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe space from which to spread throughout the organization.
I agree with others here that think they need to be a quasi-government-run company, but in the US that is done through oversight, managing the manager rather than stepping into the management role directly. Of course we have to absolutely gut that awful management with extreme prejudice, to start.
Letting them merge with McDonnel-Douglas was a mistake.
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
Of course we taxpayers (corporate share of tax revenue is miniscule compared to 50 years ago) bailed them out...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bail...
It wasn't Boeing's fault that the governors shut down the economy, something that had never happened before in the US.
In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple.
Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.
The purpose of being in business is to make more money than you could by putting the money in an interest-bearing account. Another way of saying it is there is no point to operating a business if you cannot make more than the "opportunity cost".
> Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization.
What businesses are in business to do is put cash to work earning more than the opportunity cost, often meaning about 15% ROI.
That certainly is not a microoptimization.
In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
I do something similar with my investments. I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Yes, minimizing uninvested capital --- or the extreme case of it, turning that negative through leverage --- is great, until it isn't.
Elon Musk at one point was within hours of personal bankruptcy with Tesla when he managed to secure more funding. He's the richest man in the world, and got that way by taking on enormous personal risk.
How wealthy would you be today if you put everything you had into Amazon stock the day of its IPO?
At some point, you're just hoping to get lucky, and to leave other people (debtors, governments) holding the bill if you don't. This is what people talk about when they criticize others for "privatizing profits, socializing risk."
Economists have a word for it, too: "moral hazard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Back to Boeing: Boeing put up really good numbers by gutting engineering and manufacturing organizations, hoping it would all turn out okay. For awhile it did, but then it didn't.
And it's questionable how much of these costs Boeing is going to bear, because there's a whole lot of talk in policymaking circles about how to keep an important defense manufacturer and top manufacturer alive (through contracts, tariffs, and supportive policy).
The moral hazard comes into play when the risk is forced on some unwitting bystander.
A degree of risk is priced into the interest rate. I still have a fiduciary duty to my lenders to not take undue, undisclosed risks. In practice, people get away with this except in the most egregious cases, but that doesn't make it less wrong.
Worse, systemic risk isn't priced into the interest rate, because the government tends to bail out the banks.
Everyone using leverage and betting on things going up forever is a really big part of how you get 2008. A lot of people made a ton of money in the run-up to 2008 (privatized profits); the population as a whole paid the costs (socialized losses).
edit: I wrote "borrowers" above when I meant lenders.
Getting more of your capital as debt is a microoptimisation (unless there are special circumstances like different tax treatment, and usually even then) - that's the classic Modigliani-Miller result. Holding more cash makes your nominal return on equity lower, but improves your cash position, and unless you push it to the point where you're taking a real risk of actually going bankrupt the two effects balance and your risk-adjusted return is the same.
> I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
Exactly. So it really doesn't make a lot of difference how levered a given company is, because an investor can always make a more or less levered investment in the company - if a company has a lot of cash then an investor can lever up a lot, if a company has a lot of debt that same investor levers less or not at all, and ultimately either way the investor gets the same level of risk and the same return.
> It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Not really - there are all sorts of special treatments for home mortgages (in particular the mortgage interest tax deduction, the most horribly regressive piece of the tax code) that mean you're genuinely disproportionately better off to do one. But it's rare for something like that to apply to corporate borrowing.
But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.
The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
<cough> 737MAX
> It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
... only to the bar they set themselves with the older 737s?
We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.
Apple is one of the halves of the phone duopoly sadly, so it will take a long time for them to pay for Cook's decisions this time.
I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.
I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?
I'd love to know.
But among other things they are subject to the dictator trap, and of course they have a best before date.
So a visionary leader is a good person to have during bootstrap, but then your processes need to become self-sustaining.
This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.
I really want to know about studies being done in this area.
Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.
It's possible for the underlings to be good despite bad management, but if the underlings are bad that is again a consequence of poor management.
The only exception would be deliberate sabotage, which is not unknown but incredibly rare.
It should rub you the wrong way. It denies both the agency and the moral obligation of the professionals working under the managers.
Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.
So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.
There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.
From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.
Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.
engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.
Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any sense.
Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are in the process of getting laid off now!
Because there are people working at Boeing, people like you or me, who poured their heart into the project and the institution sapped their energy away and made their efforts ultimately worse than futile.
There was someone working at Boeing who spent years of their life qualifying those thrusters. They tried their very best. Perhaps they even batted for more testing. Or more analysis. Or perhaps they didn't because they didn't know better, but they still spent their best effort to do a good job.
And when they heard that the engines are acting up they probably felt like a trap door has opened under them. They felt that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Either angry that they haven't caught this in testing, or angry that they haven't approved their request to test more.
Years and years ago they proudly told their mom/girlfriend/drinking buddies that they are working on a beautiful spaceship. And they were very proud of the project. And now all those people have heard that their spaceship is a liability. All that good feeling turned ash in their mouth.
There are people at Boeing who worked very very hard the last few weeks (months?) trying to uncover what is wrong with those thrusters. There are others who spent endless hours in meetings with NASA discussing risks and explaining tests and arguing persuasively that the space ship is fine enough to ride. And it is not really their individual fault that the spaceship is not fine.
And even worse, there are people who spent years of their life designing and building flawless systems. And they did a great job and built their subsystem really really well. Well made, high quality products. Yet nobody will think of their stuff positively because some other subsystem failed.
It is kind of like you are working on a beautiful great pyramid. (FYI pyramids were not built by slaves.) And you work hard, and quarry stone all day, and shape it, and push it and pull it and you really really do your best job. You are really a champ. And you should deserve to celebrate in the sun with your team mates the beautiful pyramid. But unfortunately you are not one of the lucky ones working on Khufu's pyramid, you are on the team which works the second pyramid built for Sneferu. And something is wrong with the plans. Or the foundations, or the site selection. Or the rocks are not strong enough. Nobody really knows but even though you are doing a great job individually the damn thing is collapsing in front of your eyes. And it will be known forever as the "bent pyramid". And it sucks. And you feel bad. And that is sad and we should feel bad for those people.
What do Boeing actually do?
It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.
https://manifold.markets/TimothyBandors/will-boeings-starlin...
If people knew what NASA knew that graph would look a whole lot different. NASA misled the public and then slowly let the cat out of the bag.
Two, anyone pretending to have known a month ago how this would turn out was lying.
I'm still processing that sentence
Given that, the subsequent merger of McD with Boeing should not have been approved.
Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
Good job bean counters.
- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats
- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
So from a keep humans safe while still attempting to complete the Starliner mission as much as possible, to me this is the best solution. In fact, it's kind of bonus for Boeing to test the automated return that was not part of the original mission. </spinDocter>
Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.
What shall we make of all of this should it succeed?
- returning Starliner empty is the correct decision
- a successful return doesn’t indicate they were wrong about the risk
- the experts will learn a lot more from poring over mission data
(Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters, and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)
That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.
Boeing still takes all the blame.
Boeing is cooked. SLS should be scrapped. There has got to be consequences for over spending, under delivering, and outright failing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
As late as July 28, flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.
Amazing that, even after today's confirmation of what we all expected, there are still those in denial.
>They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8
Yes, lashed to a jury-rigged harness in the cargo department. Right now NASA is in de facto violation of the ironclad rule of always having a seat for everyone aboard ISS, and for about three weeks between Crew 8's departure and Crew 9's arrival, the violation will be even greater.
>Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
As I wrote in the link in the comment that you keep seeing everywhere but never bothered to read:
>NASA has said that in an emergency the astronauts will use Starliner. That is not the same thing as saying that using Starliner (whether in an emergency or not) to return to earth is as safe as using Soyuz or Crew Dragon, and every day the return is delayed (hitting two months very shortly) is additional proof of this.
>Put another way, if there is an emergency on ISS right now, the two astronauts that flew on Starliner have to take Starliner back because there is no alternative. There are no extra seats on Soyuz or Crew Dragon docked there.
and
>In an "ISS explodes tomorrow and there is no Starliner" situation, of course Wilmore and Williams will be strapped in as tightly as possible as cargo in Crew Dragon. The ride might be bumpy, but should be survivable.
>The interesting question is, in an "ISS explodes tomorrow" scenario, does the above still occur? Based on all available reporting the answer would until very recently have been "No; Wilmore and Williams will use Starliner". I am no longer sure that this is the case.
Note the last sentence.
Look at this shit. Just look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXnMlxK22A
It's amazing how many people, whether sympathetic to SpaceX or not, believe that NASA built its previous spacecraft in-house or something. The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
I think there is a big difference you haven't mentioned.
With Apollo, with the Space Shuttle, with the US components of the ISS, with SLS/Orion – NASA owned the design and made the big design decisions. They hired contractors to do a lot of the grunt work of the engineering – analysing different options, fleshing out high-level designs into detailed designs, etc – but the big picture design decisions were made by NASA. (Or, in the case of SLS, dictated to NASA by Congress.)
By contrast, with Commercial Cargo/Crew and HLS, NASA is just writing the requirements spec and letting the contractors make the big design decisions. And then the contractors have to convince NASA's engineers that the design actually fulfils those requirements. But NASA isn't making decisions like "what fuel should the launch vehicle use"–so long as they can convince NASA that what they are doing meets the requirements spec, the contractor can do almost anything they like. Whereas, on earlier programs, NASA was making the final call on many of those high-level design decisions.
Thanks for the link. That is truly amazing to watch!
what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime
Boeing is the one who (yet again) let everyone down. First by making another unreliable vehicle, then by downplaying the seriousness.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
It goes up and up with every aerospace company doing government contracting.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
What did Henry Ford do really for cars, the assembly line is all I can think of.
Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.
P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.
The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.
Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.
You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.
> Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private
Twitter's costs are down 80%, too. I wouldn't be surprised if X was currently profitable, though since it is privately held, who know.
But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.
I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.
Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.
Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
(Hi Walter. Love your posts...)
My investment strategy is not advocated by any investment advice I've ever seen.
I suppose ask your broker about it.
Don't get me wrong it's perfectly fine to criticize someone on specific things - however, you are just blanket calling someone you don't know a sad loser... honestly says more about you than him.
It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.
It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.
Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.
> how does Musk still not have the judgement to just keep his mouth shut when he doesn’t have something nice to say?
I'm old, and no longer care what people say. It's what they do that matters.
I don't think he himself is racist, but he seems to enjoy hanging out with a lot of racists, and he gives me vibes that he thinks anti-racism is more of a problem than racism.
There is no doubt that one can easily find many individual Jews, and even groups of Jews, who have endorsed anti-white hatred. However, Jews are prominent in all parts of the political spectrum due probably mainly to their high average level of intellectual ability, so basically anyone could find prominent Jews among their political opponents no matter what sort of politics one has. Some of the most prominent figures who are generally considered far-right in today's Western Overton window, and most definitely are not anti-white, are Jewish. For example, David Horowitz, Curtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu, and many others. Then there is Israel, which in some ways is far-right by modern US standards, and is a place where I imagine the majority of the population both consider themselves white and are not anti-white in the slightest, rather the opposite. The idea that entire broad communities of Jews promote anti-white hatred is not supportable by reality as far as I can tell.
I forgot about that endorsement of his. You make a good point. I am not sure that his endorsement was just a case of misunderstanding on his part rather than revealing a deeper racist sentiment. It could go either way. It is possible that he was just sloppy and interpreted "Jewish communities" to mean "certain groups of Jews", which is what he tried to say when he backtracked from his endorsement later, and it is also possible that he actually dislikes Jewish people in general. But I agree that it is not unlikely that he has at least some underlying anti-Jewish sentiment.
Funnily, I notice that many people who have anti-Jewish sentiment misunderstand what is typically happening when individual Jews express anti-white sentiment. Usually what is happening in such cases is that the person considers himself both white and Jewish, so when he expresses anti-white sentiment it is not as a Jewish person hating on whites, it is actually as a self-hating white hating on whites. I would not be surprised if Jewish whites in the US are more likely to express anti-white sentiment than non-Jewish whites are, since Jewish people in the US tend to be leftist and being a self-hating white person is a very common characteristic of leftist whites, but that does not mean that communities of Jews are anti-white unless you use the word "communities" in a rather non-standard way.
As far as transphobia goes, I am not so sure. Musk seems to be a bad father to his trans child, but I cannot think off the top of my head of any transphobic things that he has said, unless you think that it is transphobic to not consider a trans woman a woman. Which I do not consider transphobic at all. But I might not be aware of some of his statements.
As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the government's involvement.
SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.
There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.
Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.
much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/trump-misleads-on-the-cost...
> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
They did Tesla an enormous favor by pushing the other car manufacturers to adopt their standard. A good use of government power, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Charging_Standa...
The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...
Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."
> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.
https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/12744
"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."
> https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...
You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)
The number of stations does not appear in the bill.
https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf
The 500,000 charger was a campaign promise in 2020 not directly connected to the funding allocated in 2021
https://grist.org/energy/biden-wants-to-build-500000-ev-char...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/building-the-2030-nat...
Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.
I think that’s unlikely.
Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.
Incidentally this was the inception of the Tech Right. Before that, Elon exclusively voted for Democrats.
I didn't realize the impact back then: https://x.com/mualphaxi/status/1817562306764566824
- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval
- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval
-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval
and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.
SpaceX just happens to be the best in every aspect.
However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .
I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.
No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.
SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .
Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex...
"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."
Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RatSat#Aftermath
"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
Give the credit where it's due, as they say.
No; SpaceX received DARPA (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060048219/downloads/20...), Air Force (https://www.space.com/2196-spacex-inaugural-falcon-1-rocket-...), and NASA funding (COTS, in 2006) prior to their first orbital success with Falcon 1.
This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed
DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.
> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...
> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.
We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.
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Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.
The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.
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So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.
Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.
relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.
space flight is a dangerous business.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].
From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".
It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...
> we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way
We need more than one musk. Unfortunately that’s like one in a century.
This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
Pretty sad state of affairs.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
https://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=0...
Political propaganda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_F...
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
"We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's." still applies. Fixing the everyday problem is part of the problem-set to get to the "civilization advancing" goals.
But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
>But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
Why is it that society should be expected to solve these extremely difficult problems to go into space and to do all these other sci-fi things but when it comes to the standards of living that humans were once capable of, its "oh what you had were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors".
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. If you want the magic of the future that you see in the comic books get the fundamentals right first!
After the super-basics like hunger, homelessness and violent crime, the next item on the list should be this problem of the value of a human's labor (As to how, I'll leave open for discussion). I believe it's been going down since the 1950's because we've transitioned away from manual labor and onto more "knowledge based" labor, of which most people are not keeping up. And of no fault of their own necessarily. We're simultaneously not assisting them with schooling and training, but we're also trying to insulate them from the negative effects of their falling-behind by not promoting a meritocracy.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
The original STS design looked a lot more like late-game KSP1 (possibly depending on the player).
The Saturn V could get 44.5 tons to the moon.
So instead of the shuttle program we could have had whatever amount of moon base you'd get with just under 7500 tons on the moon.
And that's assuming a very expensive Saturn V, in reality the system would have become cheaper over time due to optimization and amortization.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
The per launch cost was the same when dividing the overall cost by the number of launches. Saturn V launched 13 times, the shuttle 135 times.
There's just no way to rationalize the whole project not being a terrible idea from beginning to end.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
It was wildly successful.
You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal was to go to space cheaply or whatever.
But the success of the shuttle program pales in comparison to the SLS and Artemis.
Now they're spending more money in all the right places, without that pesky distraction of launching the thing into space.
You're way off in the wonderland considering the goals and achievements. Just remember who's the actual goal setter is. Don't fool yourself.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also: Astra ABL Firefly Relativity Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_(spacecraft)
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
See Chernobyl.
>For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically, Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers driven" company.
>At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270 of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or Engineer, it's up to a politician.
>Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run, everybody wins except Musk.
Utter bilge. I bet the author knows nothing about engineers or running a business.
See Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Fukushima, Enron, Theranos, etc.
With the cheap talking points out of the way, one could examine this question carefully and objectively now.
But it is preposterous to draw conclusions about state vs private enterprises from this N=1 example. There have been many successful government-run megaprojects (Panama Canal, Dutch North Sea dams, China's high-speed-rail). There have been many unsuccessful private ones.
Adjudicating this question would require careful enumeration and analysis across many instances, not just throwing out one example.
McKinsey, for example, states that megaprojects can fail "when big projects cross state or national borders and involve a mix of private and government spending."
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insight...
Private US health care is way more expensive than basically anywhere else in the world, while delivering worse outcomes than most places.
Want to trade anecdotes all day? We can do that. Or you can address the question at hand seriously, as I suggested before.
I think a stronger interpretation would be that Boeing's management/corporate culture needs a dramatic shake-up.
Short of letting the company fail completely if left alone, nationalization might well be the best measure out of a long list of not-great measures to shore things up.
Not saying that it's the measure that should be chosen per-se, but as usual it's often better to be pragmatic than ideological at least.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
Practically nobody was asking "how are they bringing back starliner?"
Practically everyone was asking "how are the astronauts returning?"
Obviously, they're not gonna just count out the humans involved, but it make sense they want to focus on the core mission.
At least that's how I understood it from listening to the press conference for the last half hour or so.`
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
[1] https://www.acityonmars.com/
You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.
That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing, which is structured around exploiting cost-plus contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them to make it work with Vulcan.
That book is full of bad science. Some of the silly claims are addressed here: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-ii
This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the vehicle?
Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.
We are literally building the future, HTF do we keep getting into these situations?
A group of professors liked jokes, but got tired of hearing the same ones, so they started numbering them. So instead of telling a joke or funny observation when something happened, they'd say "112" and the others would laugh. or "64", more laughter.
One day they get a new prof on their team and after a few weeks of this number, laugh, number, laugh, during a meeting, the new guy says "-149". There's dead silence for a while. The eldest prof starts laughing, "i've never heard that one!"
At least it's more pithy than "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra".
In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:
"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
Oh, good. Previous proposals included having them return in a Dragon unsuited.[1]
[1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-space...
Quite recently there was a Soyuz with crippled cooling and the contingency plan for the American astronaut that came with it was to evacuate via Dragon if there was an emergency before new Soyuz arrived.
It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.
It’s why scandals like the 737 Max are so appalling. We know better. Boeing knew better.
The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of something else on the day of their flight than from a crash. But still we know how to do better and things improved.
Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a failure and millions of like could have been saved. It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
You can't maximize both.
Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.
Manufacturers push those because of less environmental regs on those vs the perfectly viable Class 1.
And FYI those trucks are bigger because you need more volume and moment-arm when building them out of lighter aluminum instead of heavier steel- a direct consequence of CAFE standards.
I imagine we'd agree that CAFE was poorly done.
I think you mean to say cutting back on costs due to corporate greed?
#1 most obvious atm is autostop.
Starter gives you enough juice to enter the intersection, but engine sputters and you get tboned. Same for not providing enough acceleration/ hp.
Also 1 pedal driving.
Electric cars that outweigh the 'old' 'inefficient' light trucks because batteries are heavy. Harder to stop, more wear on roads. Tires that are designed to extract breaking energy over stopping.
Lithium fires (not cause but much more dangerous result).
Aluminum crush zones in cars not big enough to have crush zones.
Every design decision is a compromise.
It is a testament to the not-yet-entirely-captured regulatory regime of international flight that the 737 MAX was not considered safe enough.
Is the MAX safe now? After killing over 300 people needlessly, being grounded for 1.5y, and an extensive investigation? Yeah sure, probably.
To be saying what your saying, I think you mustn't of followed Max 8 MCAS debacle very closely, or at all.
~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)
By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.
I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...
People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.
What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.
> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft
Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.
> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours
We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.
Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.
The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.
NTSB investigations of road fatalities, given teeth, would radically change how cars interact with one another.
e.g., "Things ran great, until ... they didn't."
This gets my vote for most vacuous statement on HN this year.
Tossing that many caveats and still not being the worst aircraft is shocking to many people.
Again it should be compared to modern aircraft, but this just shows how far we’ve come that the bar has moved this far.
Right, exactly, and this is why this sub-thread is so maddeningly weird. I'm going to compare the 737 MAX's safety record to that of the 737 NG, 777, 787, 757, as well as to Airbus' current-gen 3xx planes. I don't care how it compares to the DC-8 or 707 or 720 because it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever fly on one of those.
And I'm certainly not comparing to the kinds of small planes general aviation pilots fly, and I'm not comparing against other modes of transportation. I already know that I'm safer in a plane (even in a 737 MAX) than in a car, but if I'm choosing to drive, I'm choosing to drive. If I'm choosing to fly, then then the 737 MAX's record, coupled with how poorly Boeing has handled the situation, is a big concern to me.
And I get that, it’s obvious given the choice you pick the safer aircraft. But in a broader context the numbers are so low it’s hard to contemplate.
Currently it’s 2 per 6 million flights. Spend the cost of a flight on Powerball tickets and you’re more likely to with the jackpot than have been on one of those fatal crashes. But people still think of those risks and chances as worth thinking about, which is also why lotteries stick around.
The 787 Dreamliner which came out 15 years ago, has no deaths at all.
It's not good. It's about 5x as deadly as the 747-400... And it just got started.
Driving 25 miles in the US is in 2022 was as dangerous on average vs a random 737 Max flight over its history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... In 2022 the average car was driven 14,500 miles or ~600 flights worth of risk, but people still really worry about it.
The Concorde was a niche aircraft that hasn't flown for over 20 years. Even if it were flying today, I would still consider its safety record as in a completely separate bucket than subsonic commercial airliners.
And I don't care how the 737 MAX compares to driving. I care how it compares to other, similar, commercial aircraft in use today. If I'm going to drive, I drive. If I'm going to fly, I'm going to care about how the plane on my itinerary compares to other planes I could be sitting on with a similar itinerary.
Risk I regularly take are hardly irrelevant to me. I consider this kind of comparison to be foundational to rational behavior.
> completely separate bucket than other subsonic commercial airliners
It didn’t have the worst history compared to other subsonic commercial airliners flying at the time when they grounded it. What it had was the potential for improvement.
If you actually care about safety knowing what the actual most dangerous aircraft are would be the rational decision. And today the 737 Max has had 20x the flights and still the same number of accidents. So if you’re concerned about safety how does it stack up?
> It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature [for cars] etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities. In most crashes, the driver(s) involved are completely sober. Making breathalyzers mandatory in cars would be awful.
Your understanding is wrong, “About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher).”
> 737 MAX being safe
At the time it was under 1 accident per 300,000+ flights which is objectively lower than 2 other jets flying at the time. Today with 346 died in 2 crashes but another 200+ people died of medical emergencies on 737 Max flights. That’s the kind of risk people are taking, flying it’s slightly more dangerous than spending that much time sitting at home watching TV.
One crashed on the runway after pilot error, killing three people (two of them weren't wearing seatbelts)
One was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile, killing all on board.
And the other is a mystery, we can't even find the crash site. But most evidence points towards deliberate pilot suicide.
What? Do you have a source for the last one? That sounds like corporate propaganda. It’s well understood AND PROVEN that the MCAS system (which was a system borrowed from decades old military code) was at fault for this incident. Saying it was suicide seems incredibly disrespectful to both pilots… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610 In the article it even states they found the wreckage…
To date, neither the 777 nor the 787 have had any passenger fatalities from any aircraft engineering flaw. That is a monumental achievement.
I have read up on the 777 and yes, I agree it’s incredibly safe statistically (as is the 787). I didn’t realize the commenter was talking about the Malaysia flight either. Apologies to them
I think Dragon 2 could easily be roughly an order of magnitude more reliable than the shuttle, if not more. It has full abort coverage and a TPS that doesn't habitually receive damage from falling debris, and is more robust to impacts besides; and its record so far is exemplary.
The seats are standard, but each astronaut has their own mold, taken on Earth, which is put into the seat.
The completed Soyuz seat (head is toward the left): https://ar.culture.ru/attachments/attachment/middle/5de8f6c2...
Source https://ar.culture.ru/en/subject/lozhement-kosmonavta-kov
For the journey home from ISS to Earth, the probability threshold is 1-in-1000. Likewise, it is 1-in-1000 for the journey from Earth to ISS.
The riskiest part, which increases the probability from 1-in-500 to 1-in-270, is the ISS stay – the extended stay in space is faced with a continuous risk of micrometeoroid damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMwKwcMdIg
Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.
But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.
I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.
If there was a fair chance I’d die on the trip, damn straight if be in my super hero undies too.
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
I've read biographies of both - well worth reading for anyone who wants to read about great Americans.
I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.
I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.
That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him.
Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
He was tolerated because he got results. With the size of his budget, it would be a very, very rare CEO who would tolerate that.
I recently did a presentation on how genius code is code so simple that people dismiss it with "anyone could have done that!"
https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/08747449...
The Kármán Line is also generally accepted to be the boundary of outer space, set at 100 kilometers above ground.
The ISS orbits at something like 415km above Earth.
I'm no lawyer but is seems plausible to say no, orbiting above 100km of altitude over the USA would not be considered entry into the country.
edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone else to file your taxes for you, right?
The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")
Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.
NY Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/13/archives/apollo-13-coasts...
Mission transcript: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
At least the customs requirement has been resolved: https://www.flexport.com/blog/apollo-11-astronauts-cleared-m...
That gave me a good laugh. Shouldn't it definitely count? You're zipping over every country on earth while you're in orbit so you definitely left!
But if you take off and land in the US, did you _really_ leave? You don't go through customs and immigration for every country you fly over when you're in an airplane, and generally aren't legally considered to have "visited" them. So, wow, good question.