Glad this is happening. ULA is a good launch provider even if they are insanely expensive vs SpaceX.
Yes, Elon is right, SpaceX did it cheaper, faster everything that you'd dream of. But, from a policy making standpoint, you always need to diversify at the expense of upfront money because the downsides risks are too high if you put all your eggs in one basket.
That said - I do wish Boeing+ULA would get it's act together. Because nearly 80%+ cost to the tax payer for hedging is quite expensive. US Gov definitely enables this.
I've said contradicting statements. My conclusion is, this is overall net positive even if pricy.
The chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two companies, exact same issues - go figure). But SpaceX is ideologically motivated and minimizing the costs of spaceflight, as they have now been doing for decades, is a fundamental part of their goal. To use an obvious example, we didn't build out two identical Apollo programs.
Space is orders of magnitude more complex than air flight, and Boeing is now left struggling even with the latter. China has a highly advanced space program and have successfully launched/manned their own space station, and much more. Yet even they are technologically far behind SpaceX - the same is true of Russia. I don't actually understand why this is, as it's not like SpaceX is relying on any sort of just extremely well guarded secrets, but whatever the reason, it is what it is. And so with this context, I don't think there's any realistic chance of Boeing "getting its act together" anytime in the foreseeable future. So it turns these gestures into little more than lighting tens of billions of dollars on fire. And that's a pretty big fire.
SpaceX’s key insight was that the hardest part about building rockets was components manufacturing and attacked that problem aggressively, bringing in as much in-house as possible vs. outsourcing to a nationwide supply chain.
And there is no real secret to a lot of their manufacturing methods either. They just attacked hard problems aggressively with really smart people and clear leadership.
I think it's because SpaceX is more influenced by engineering/design/cost than their competitors.
Other companies, like Toyota, have intermittently focused mostly on engineering/design/cost, but they went back to their old habits after gaining market dominance instead of using their position to push the market forward in some other way.
I'm not sure I get the 'intermittently' thing? They always seem to have been much the same, maybe with more emphasis on reliability and customer satisfaction rather than flashiness than some of their competitors. They also seem to stick to making good cars rather than doing mergers and acquisitions unlike say GM or VW.
Even still having Toyota around is great because they are absolutely killing it (Americans want hybrids because you can't plug in a car so easily if you live in the big city, live in an apartment, etc).
While I agree with almost everything, I disagree with the "zero". Musk's perceived pettiness can easily handicap spaceX. The goal to colonize Mars is noble but not profitable. Gwynne Shotwell could one day say to to his ideas, she and her top level management team could get canned, and I would say that would be an irrecoverable error.
Second, redundancy is good, although I wish the other provider was not Boeing. even Dragon at one point exploded, and at that time starliner and dragon had very different perceived trajectories. Of course, with Eric Berger's new article on ars technica on Boeing, it's a wonder Starliner even exists.
Definitely. I'd actually go one step further and say that they will eventually lose a crew of astronauts. Perhaps to the ISS, but most definitely to Mars. The Falcon is the most reliable rocket ever made with some 335 successes for 2 failures contrasted against e.g. 133 and 2 for the Space Shuttle, but that failure rate is still extremely high relative to something like an airplane. And the overwhelming majority of all space flights are for "simple" repetitive tasks. As we increase the number of manned missions, as well as their complexity - the eventual loss of crewed missions is an absolute certainty. Something like 3% of all astronauts have died 'on the job' making it likely the single most dangerous profession in existence. Space remains extremely complex and dangerous, and it's likely to only become even more so in the decades to come as we increase the complexity of tasks carried out.
The reason NASA's failures were such a huge deal is because they shouldn't have happened. In both cases you had issues with the managerial layer ignoring the engineering layer, and moving ahead in high risk scenarios - that was particularly stupid in Challenger, where they also had a high profile civilian aboard. In SpaceX the managerial layer and the technical layer are largely the same thing, and they also have a system where any flight engineer can independently cancel a flight, for any reason, at his own discretion. So the chances of a flight moving forward with a predictable risk is quite low. So what will most likely happen when they lose a crewed flight is an investigation to ensure it was not caused by systemic errors, some effort to ensure that whatever did happen does not happen again, and then a return to flight.
This will certainly happen, just as it has already happened to the Russians and the Americans (several times). If the Chinese fly often enough, it will also happen to them. The only difference, of course, is that SpaceX is not a state institution, but a private one. This would certainly have fatal consequences for a share. But I believe that the social consequences can be managed. Which in turn means that if this happens quickly enough, the financial damage would be reversible.
From a macro view, competence requires growth, right?
Look at the 60s - there's tremendous excitement about space, astronauts are heroes, everyone is putting in 10x effort to get over the finish line.
What Boeing is being asked to do now is replicate this every few years, except all the attention, all the excitement, all the growth is gone. They have to recreate the miracle, but nobody cares!
SpaceX comes in and says - we have a new heroic mission. Do the same thing, but make it repeatable and efficient and stupid easy.
Most likely the same reason as for industry espionage by said countries: Conceptually designing a spacecraft and assuming certain physics properties is a long stretch away from actually manufacturing components with materials that stand up to the stress of a launch.
The “secret” to reliable components which can be produced at scale is very much not generally out there.
I will say, some of the techniques that live in the brains of machinists/welders/technicians is borderline alchemy, and sometimes highly specific to the worker themselves.
Can’t really scale that. And good luck doing corporate espionage outside of physically kidnapping them.
> The chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them.
Financially, there is almost zero chance for SpaceX to go under at the point they're at - every launch is profitable for them and the margin goes up with each time they can re-use any component, for boosters their record holder was at 19 launches until it was taken out by bad weather during transport [1].
The real danger for SpaceX is Elon Musk, plain and simple. Either he does something really stupid, something even more dumb than playing personal CSR for neo-Nazis, and the US government says "okay, that's f...ing enough now" as a result, or he goes completely against the US government: push for Mars because he finds out he has some sort of cancer or whatnot and wants to die there while the US government wants to first focus on the moon, or turn off services to Ukraine and instead provide services to Russia... or sell critical information to Russia, China or whatever just to stick the finger to the US government (aka, follow the Trumpian way of "I do what I want, what do they wanna do lol").
Yes, the US government can always go and nationalize SpaceX if need be, so it's not too high of a risk for SpaceX to go completely belly-up, but it would mean years upon years of nasty judicial fights.
The only thing that's particularly unique about Elon is that he voices his actual opinions on topics instead of what he thinks will be most well received. It's a throw back to times long since past, where you will find highly visible individuals often had views starkly different than those of the government. It's not that that's changed - if anything I expect there's far less support for government decisions than in the past.
But what has changed is that the government has grown absolutely massive. This growth has created a dependency relationship from many major companies, as falling out of favor with an oft retaliatory government could be ruinous to their margins. Vice versa, the government is not only excessively generous with companies that play ball, but also often turns a blind eye to their offenses. This has driven a culture of widespread self censorship and feigned never-ending approval.
If anything I think Elon voicing his genuine opinions on matters, right or wrong, is one of the most patriotic things he could be doing, because loyalty to a country does not mean loyalty to a government - and often it's the exact opposite. Even in military oaths, for instance, this reality is observed. Officers swear oaths of loyalty not to the government, the President, or even their chain of command, but to the US Constitution. [1] There's endless great quotes from the Founding Fathers on this topic. A few random ones:
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- "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison
- "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." - Thomas Jefferson
- "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams
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I think the world, and especially our democracy, would work vastly better if everybody just spoke honestly. Right or wrong, smart or stupid. People freely and openly expressing themselves is the only way a democracy can really function. There is a reason that the 1st Amendment is at the top of the Bill of Rights. And right now we live in a time where this is probably more true than ever. Opposing never-ending wars, rapidly trending towards WW3, and the grossly out of touch and seemingly delusional politicians driving us there, does not demonstrate disloyalty. If anything, the path we're currently on could very well lead to ruin, yet so few are willing to observe that the Emperor has no clothes.
I think it's fine for Elon to voice his opinion, even if direct or hurtful.
He should though have a mirror held in front of him in public occasionally. It works for you alright, but have you considered the consequences of everyone else acting the same way ? What actions do you think will derive from creating an agenda of "do as I do or f** you" ?
It's the categorical imperative of ethics. In the sense that a good (ethical) agenda doesn't derive from "eff all others".
Commentary on, and the questioning of other's opinions is as much a necessary part of free speech as is the right to voice your opinions.
I think we need more commentary, and more questions.
> People freely and openly expressing themselves is the only way a democracy can really function. There is a reason that the 1st Amendment is at the top of the Bill of Rights.
The problem is, if you don't make sure that there is at least a common baseline of decency, eventually the one willing to fight the dirtiest will win out. "Anything goes, no repercussions" will always lead to a destructive death spiral as politicians and candidates will appeal to lower and lower emotions to score votes, and the ones who feel it most are usually those in a lower position of society: LGBT, migrants, even pregnant women.
We've seen that in Germany in the events running up to 1933, we're seeing it across Europe now with the rise of the far-right willing to do literally anything including running on complete and utter lies (worst example: Brexit and the infamous NHS bus), we're seeing it in the US with the transformation of the GOP into MAGA and the unholy crusade of Evangelicals/White Christian Nationalists ("Project 2025") against everyone who is not like them. And on top of that you got the threat of "stochastic terrorism" - basically, speech that is legal in most jurisdictions, but powerful enough in its message to convince deranged people to act and kill [1].
The US and the UK are the only developed countries in the world which still run on their original constitutions and their principles from centuries ago: a time in which it was completely infeasible to even think about a technology that would allow literally all the village idiots from all over the world to communicate with - and radicalize! - each other, and it was generally assumed that institutions of a government could reasonably rely on other institutions of the government to follow the written and unwritten rules. Everyone else has updated their constitutions in the meantime, mostly due to acts of war, and used the chance to update their systems to learn from the past and its deficiencies.
> - "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams
Well, we'll see how that one works out in November this year. The people behind "Project 2025" [2] have made it very, very clear on where they want to take the US - first, purge everyone they deem to be a threat to them from the bureaucracy, and then transition the US into a Christian theocratic dictatorship.
I disagree with you on the UK running according to a "constitution". It definitely has none.
It runs ancient law / legal precedence; As example, the current government has used "Henry VIIIth powers" (basically ... sovereign edicts) more than once in the last decade. But the UK body of law doesn't denote anything specifically as "constitutional".
That said, it has a strong (legal) history on somewhat-free speech, more recent libel laws notwithstanding, more recent "hate speech" laws notwithstanding.
Free speech alone though only helps public discourse if there is no attempt to "balance" differing views. Trying that has the opposite effect; instead of pointing out flaws and lies in any argument, the mediator simply "gives equal airtime" to conflicting views. That's the perfect way to polarize - choose whom you're with, and whom you're against. Political commentary is rather important, if it's missing, people miss out.
Don't _think_ about what they say. Don't look for common ground. Don't look for lunacies in any side. Just ... pick, ok ? We've shown you both, so ...
> I disagree with you on the UK running according to a "constitution". It definitely has none.
Germany doesn't have a "constitution" either, and so doesn't Israel, we run on "basic laws" instead which are functionally equivalent. And the UK instead runs on the entire body of its truly ancient laws, court decisions and international treaties. But no one would argue that either of the three nations is not a democracy or a constitutional state (i.e. a state where individuals and legal entities enjoy a reasonably common set of protections).
> Free speech alone though only helps public discourse if there is no attempt to "balance" differing views. Trying that has the opposite effect; instead of pointing out flaws and lies in any argument, the mediator simply "gives equal airtime" to conflicting views. That's the perfect way to polarize - choose whom you're with, and whom you're against.
There is another bad aspect in "balancing" itself, perfectly illustrated by "flat earth" believers. We don't go and give people who believe that the earth is flat equal airtime to those believing we're on a globe, in fact we don't give them any airtime (except when we need to fill some airtime by laughing about ridiculously dumb people) - but there are enough reckless / profit-addicted media that give airtime to COVID deniers, antivaxxers, "great replacement" and other conspiracy spreaders.
Democracy itself can only work on a common set of core beliefs and truths. Once lies are allowed to be part of democratic discourse, the defenders of democracy will have to spend way more of their share of airtime to refute the lies instead of presenting their point of view - a phenomenon/rhetoric tactic known as "firehose of falsehoods", basically flooding the argument with lies (which stick with your followers thanks to repetition as an additional bonus) and making it impossible for the opponent to present their ideas. And sadly, there are more than enough media, politicians and people accepting this tactic.
We can't have free speech if anyone has the authority and power to identify and silence what they consider lies.
Flat earthers are an easy example as a vast majority of people understand that the earth is in fact not flat. You seem to take that as an example of why we can't allow people to share such ideas, of given air time you worry that more would believe it. There's an easier answer though, people know the earth is a sphere despite the flat earth idea being out there. The idea gets little air time because so few people think its possible or true.
Silencing an idea gives a certain air of feasibility to it, one in charge does need to bother silencing something that is obviously false and easily disproven.
Moving your argument to anything more widely considered than flat earth and the line between lies and truths is much less clear, and therefore the line of where speech should be silenced is much trickier. Covid should have made this clear, health officials and governments have walked back on almost all of the ideas that they claimed to be dangerous lies during the pandemic response. Something unclear can easily be branded as a lie by one with power and a microphone, that doesn't mean it is a lie though and definitely doesn't mean that we all still have free speech rights if the people in charge can silence us.
> Silencing an idea gives a certain air of feasibility to it, one in charge does need to bother silencing something that is obviously false and easily disproven.
Allowing an idea or a viewpoint to be part of legitimate media discourse gives an even larger air of legitimacy - the so-called "Overton window" [1]. The far-right across virtually all Western countries has been very successful in expanding that window and shifting the idea of where the "center" lies very far to the right.
An example here from Germany is Beatrix von Storch, who called for allowing the police to shoot even at refugee children attempting to cross the borders back in 2016 [2], leading to major national outrage. Nowadays, articles of border police actually shooting on refugees don't even make the headlines any more, it's just a "this also happened" line.
> Covid should have made this clear, health officials and governments have walked back on almost all of the ideas that they claimed to be dangerous lies during the pandemic response.
There are only two major things that turned out to be actually wrong: that "ordinary" cloth masks protect against covid (which indeed was a lie, to prevent people from hoarding masks needed for healthcare and some sorts of employment) and that vaccines provide sterile immunity (they didn't in the end, but early data from when these statements were made suggested that this were the case and many people didn't realize that science can and does improve over time).
> Allowing an idea or a viewpoint to be part of legitimate media discourse gives an even larger air of legitimacy
When you say "allow", what do you mean exactly? I'm not sure why a legitimate media outlet would give air time to the idea of the earth being flat, for example. No one has to allow or disallow this, other than those working for the news outlet and deciding what they want to present.
> There are only two major things that turned out to be actually wrong: that "ordinary" cloth masks protect against covid (which indeed was a lie, to prevent people from hoarding masks needed for healthcare and some sorts of employment) and that vaccines provide sterile immunity (they didn't in the end, but early data from when these statements were made suggested that this were the case and many people didn't realize that science can and does improve over time).
There were plenty of other examples. Corona viruses mutate frequently, this was known well before Covid but the lie was repeated to explain why vaccines would work. Two weeks was never going to stop the spread, another lie that would have been clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of novel pathogenic spread. Herd immunity was not a realistic goal, Fauci admitted later that his targets for vaccine uptake were kept lower than realistic because he didn't think people would find the real numbers feasible. Ivermectin is not just a horse dewormer, though reasonable to think it wouldn't help with Covid it has human uses and saves countless people from river blindness. The lab leak hypothesis is, and was, a real possibility despite the campaign to brand it as dangerous and xenophobic.
I could go on but you get the point. There were much more than 2 lies pushed from the highest levels during Covid. Often they may have had good intentions, but that doesn't really matter in the context of free speech or lies in my opinion.
> When you say "allow", what do you mean exactly? I'm not sure why a legitimate media outlet would give air time to the idea of the earth being flat, for example. No one has to allow or disallow this, other than those working for the news outlet and deciding what they want to present.
I'm German. We have quite the extensive list of stuff that's banned from public discourse - it's mostly "old Nazi stuff" related obviously like Holocaust denial, but in recent years there have been quite the few additions, especially around conspiracy myths relating to antisemitism [1], war crime denial/downplayment [2] or "from the river to the sea" when it's related to Hamas [3].
Personally, I support this - it makes it clear for everyone what is and what is not considered acceptable part of democratic discourse.
> Corona viruses mutate frequently, this was known well before Covid but the lie was repeated to explain why vaccines would work.
Vaccines did and do work. Yes, people still died of Covid even with vaccinations or vaccinations against different strains, but at significantly lower rates than without the vaccines. It's been quite the time since the last reports of hospitals having to resort to use fridge trucks as makeshift morgues [4].
> Two weeks was never going to stop the spread, another lie that would have been clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of novel pathogenic spread.
Two weeks was indeed short, but four weeks was enough to crush at least the first wave of COVID in Germany [9]. I'm reasonably certain that, had we kept up the response intensity and agility at that level and coordinated it internationally, the following waves would have been much, much less severe.
> Herd immunity was not a realistic goal, Fauci admitted later that his targets for vaccine uptake were kept lower than realistic because he didn't think people would find the real numbers feasible.
Yeah, thank COVID deniers and antivaxxers for that one - there are quite the few countries who managed to get nearly everyone vaccinated [5]. When the President shills horse dewormer or shining UV lights into one's arse [6], that sets an example for the general population - and not a very good one. Of course, the ideal vaccination target would be close to 100%, but even lower targets massively help at stopping the spread.
> Ivermectin is not just a horse dewormer, though reasonable to think it wouldn't help with Covid it has human uses and saves countless people from river blindness.
Trump and large parts of the political (far) right shilled ivermectin explicitly against covid despite there being no evidence that it would actually help against covid. I can't find it any more because Google has gone down the drain, but IIRC the positive correlation of ivermectin with Covid was in populations that suffered from worms, so the patients got better as their body didn't have to fight covid and parasites at the same time.
> The lab leak hypothesis is, and was, a real possibility despite the campaign to brand it as dangerous and xenophobic.
People didn't just see it as a possibility. The President actually called COVID "kung flu" as a result of the theory cropping up, and his followers didn't waste time in (pun intended) trumping up [7]. I distinctly remember people even calling for war or other retaliatory action against China - it was more than justified IMHO to push back hard on all of that, if only to prevent a repeat of the shameful events during WW2 [8].
I think you and I actually agree more here than it seems reading the thread.
I don't agree with the idea of having specific ideas legally banned. Though being from the US I am used to the idea of having free speech and am pretty well wired to oppose laws that limit speech. I don't see any problem with a community (country in this case) coming up with speech laws that they agree with. I wouldn't consider Germany to have free speech as a right, though that may very well be by design as I'm not sure if that's even considered to be a thing.
Where we diverge here is in specific examples of lies during the pandemic response.
> Yeah, thank COVID deniers and antivaxxers for that one - there are quite the few countries who managed to get nearly everyone vaccinated
At least in the US, herd immunity claims were the fault of health leaders rather than those opposed to the vaccines. Early on Fauci frequently quotes around 60% vaccine uptake as a threshold for herd immunity. As the vaccine rollout began his number kept climbing, ultimately leading to him admitting that the earlier numbers were lower on purpose as 85-90% would have seemed unreasonable to the public. He may have been worried about how it abti-vaxxers would respond, but it was Fauci setting those targets which he knew were lies.
I only brought up Ivermectin because there were specific lies being told about it from the top. I totally agree there was no scientific reason to think it would be effective against Covid, I saw infrequent claims of its use as an antiviral but never saw clear data. The lie, though, was branding it as a horse dewormer. That's more a lie of omission as it isn't only a horse dewormer, but a lie none the less.
With regards to the lab leak hypothesis, I wouldn't begin to justify or defend Trump or any of his supporters. They're free to believe and say whatever they want, I can simply ignore it or try to show how they're wrong in a specific topic (same for Biden supporters or anyone else, dumb isn't party-specific).
That said, justifying a lie by pointing to a dangerous idiot isn't a good precedent in my opinion, and doesn't change the fact that they were lies. Health officials colluded to write papers and push a PR campaign to discredit the idea and anyone considering it. They knew that gain of function research of covid viruses was going on in the Wuhan lab and that a leak was possible. They also knew they had absolutely no evidence to support a zoological transfer.
Trump may well have been spouting his own lies, I honestly don't know if he can tell the difference between truth and lies, but my point was simply that many in charge, including those with degrees and credentials that claim to be signs of expertise in the field, knowingly lied about many, many things during the pandemic.
It's Norway, not the UK (which doesn't even have a formal constitution), with the 2nd oldest active constitution. [1] And they also have ingrained and well supported freedom of speech dating back to 1814. In fact many regular parts of Norwegian discourse would never be allowed in the US, and would be framed as some sort of ultra radical far whatever blah blah end of the world type stuff.
For instance Hjernevask [2] was an extremely popular series aired on the primary state owned broadcasting channel. It was a documentary that was highly critical of gender studies and a variety of other topics related to identity politics. The title translates to "brainwashing." And in 2011, after the documentary aired, Norway did choose to cease funding Nordic Gender Institute, leading to its closure - though they stated that the documentary was not directly why. Yet, lo and behold, Norway remains one the single most egalitarian and gender equal societies in the world.
Open dialogue is not a threat to anything except bad ideas and bad actors. And it's critical to help ensure everybody has a voice in society, even if what's coming out of their mouth is not what you might want to hear. That said I do agree with you the the US constitution could use some updates, but that would be largely to further these aims. So, for instance, I think proportional representation (as Norway swapped to in 1919) is just objectively better than this district based first past the post nonsense.
But the reason for that change is again precisely to make sure everybody has some representation. For instance, rolling with the Norway theme, here is a list of their political parties currently with representation in Parliament. [3] You've got your religious types, your socialists, your right wing populists, an agrarian party, liberal conservatives, and more. In the US we get to choose between pack of idiots #1, pack of idiots #2, and throwing away your vote.
> But the reason for that change is again precisely to make sure everybody has some representation. For instance, rolling with the Norway theme, here is a list of their political parties currently with representation in Parliament.
I put it to you that the different voting system of PR for the Storting is far more important in ensuring that outcome rather than speech.
As do a few other things; the state broadcaster rather than a set of increasingly weird private clickbait conspiracy broadcasters as in the US; the monarchy; and having Vikrund Quisling taken out and shot.
That's an odd assertion. Sure, we have a somewhat higher tolerance for risk for unmanned spaceflights, but we don't have particularly high requirements for unmanned drones either. But the reliability requirements for something like Starliner are ridiculously high and that's why it's taken a decade for the first manned flight.
A starliner is not nearly as reliable as a Boeing 777. Just look at what happened to the space shuttle. That’s also why Russians had reliable launch vehicles but not so reliable jetliners.
Those "unreliable" jetliners still complete orders of magnitude more flights between crashes than "reliable" launch vehicles. Angara A5, Russia's latest and greatest, had 1 failure out of 4 launches so far.
You're completely correct, but I think using the Angara A5 is a bit misleading. That's still in testing, and the one failure was because the exact part they were testing (the upper stage system) failed - it's more akin to something like the Starship, even if nowhere near as ambitious. It'd be more reasonable to compare something like the Soyuz-U, which has successfully sent hundreds of people to the ISS. Yet its overall failure rate is still dramatically higher than an airplane with 765 successful launches and 22 failures.
If airplanes had the same failure rates as even the most reliable rockets in existence, we'd be seeing tens to hundreds of crashes per day. Of course it's not because rockets are "allowed" to fail more regularly, but because this is the best we can currently manage.
The lifetime requirements for a lot of components even with crewed capsules and human-rated launch vehicles is an order of magnitude lower than aircraft.
“An airliner has to survive 13 hours in the air. A rocket only has to survive 13 minutes.”
COVID was a single DARPA grant cycle in length. These companies move at glacial paces compared to the SaaS plays that the typical HN dev is familiar with. I'm guessing COVID never really threatened big programs like Starliner.
Your guess would be incorrect. Boeing felt they were in risk of collapse during COVID and immediately went to the government asking for a $60 billion bailout. The government wanted equity in exchange for this bailout, which Boeing didn't want to offer. So they ended up offering Federal Reserve facilitated 'Boeing bonds', and took in about $25 billion to stay afloat. [1] Amusingly a big part of the reason they ended up in such catastrophic danger is that they'd been dumping all their cash reserves into buying their own stock, to try to bring its flagging price up. [2]
If musk will have another of his egomaniacal bouts and takes reigns, very bad stuff can happen. He is totally unpredictable at this point in any direction, does outright stupid childish decisions, being bipolar/borderline or whatever is exactly his diagnosis can be a disaster in right conditions for everybody and everything around him.
But yes as long as he keeps actually skilled and stable people managing his stuff it should be fine, more than fine.
>But, from a policy making standpoint, you always need to diversify at the expense of upfront money because the downsides risks are too high if you put all your eggs in one basket.
Funny how it used to be SpaceX making this argument, and ULA was fighting tooth-and-nail for "sole source" as cheaper. :-\
ULA (a largely anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed for those who don't know) was actively and patronizingly taunting SpaceX during their efforts at reuse, making comments along the lines of 'We tried reuse. The economics just don't work out. Good luck learning what we already did.' He (Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA) seemed to be under the impression that reuse was only possible Space Shuttle style, which was them essentially "refurbishing" engines to the point of rebuilding them after each launch, and claiming it was reuse.
There's every reason to believe that this is also exactly what they genuinely believed - that SpaceX was just going to be a failed gimmick. They made 0 efforts to try to ensure they stayed technologically ahead of SpaceX, in spite of having many orders of magnitude greater resources and manpower available to themselves. They simply watched, mocked, and became obsolete.
In any case ULA's not going anywhere. Boeing and Lockheed are both major arms dealers that the US government depends on to keep the bombs flying.
At least Bruno knows his stuff, unlike Calhoun. Believing (too long) in the conventional industry standards is to me a more forgiveable sin compared to throwing standards overboard willy nilly in the name of profit. ULA has been reliable in what they've been providing, and Vulcan looks to be a pretty capable platform - albeit it could be seen only as a bit of a plan B for the US launch industry in case Starship doesn't work out.
The refurbishment did present a problem for SpaceX, iirc.
It’s just that Elon seems to have a knack for managing Manufacturing Engineers and got Merlin production and refurb down to not just science, but magic.
The diversity argument does ring slightly hollow when iirc Boeing has only made two Starliners and it only has enough rockets for the 6 missions in the contract.
Basically they're set up to have one capsule in refurb while the other is at the station, and once the 6 Atlas V's are spent, someone has to cough up the money to do the stack of paperwork for crew rating the combo of Starliner and Vulcan.
Putting it on Falcon 9 would not be ideal since then you're back to having a single point of failure in terms of preventing crewed launches by the US. Plus, considering that they don't exactly like SpaceX, while being half of what formed ULA...
In case anyone asks, "why don't they just build more Atlas V rockets," it's because they rely on Russian engines which have been phased out due to politics:
Plus, the production lines for Atlas V have already been retooled with those for Vulcan, so even if they did have the engines, they couldn't make the rockets.
IIRC ULA did have a license to manufacture their own domestic RD-180s (or was considering getting it), but the factory for those would've been very expensive and not worth it with Vulcan in its early design stages.
That's a very good point, I could've sworn Tory Bruno had said that the line had been retooled and all the remaining cores were in storage, but the closest tweet to that seems to be referring to having the engines in storage.
I think he did say the line was retooled, but the factory is used for different rockets at the same time. The Vulcan and the Atlas were always in production at the same time.
Without SpaceX DoD would locked into a single maker, but also into a Russian made engine. 5 years behind the schedule and only after congress mandated it n
Also, their commercial airliner side used to be a "balancer" and a backup, they never were tied to the "next big gun thing" like maybe Raytheon or Lockheed are. Funny as it sounds ... Boeing's current struggles can't be blamed on them being overly cosy with government, or overly wasteful thanks to the Pentagon's deep pockets.
Not sure though that more defense money/contracts would help. "solve" what is reported about their inner culture.
I was talking about the wasted time competing with SpaceX which has taken the industry to a whole other level, and that the time could be spent on more pressing matters, like mass drone warfare both defense and attack
Please refrain from personal attacks, its against the rules and generally seen as a basic failure to communicate your opinions in mature way.
Also, I have yet to fly a single plane in Europe made by Boeing, since they started messing up badly I notice this aggressively and so far 0. Sure with small kids we do now only up to 4h flights, but we fly to other continents, and everything is Airbus or Embraer. We plan to keep it that way.
The funny thing is that Elon Musk promised us Mars and gave us orbit for cheaper than ever before. Boeing in its various incarnations has promised us orbit and given us nothing for just as expensive as before. Some people like to optimize for delta between promise and delivery. I think I like it when just delivery is optimized. There's really only one space company in the US today, and perhaps if there were other people like Elon Musk around there'd be more.
Instead, the experts who have been doing this for half a century suck balls while the newcomer from a software engineering background who didn't stay in his lane made it.
> There's really only one space company in the US today
Rocket Lab ([1]) is very decent and has a rapid launch cadence ([2]), even though their rockets are smaller than Falcon 9 (for now). They launched 8 rockets in 2023, 5 rockets in 2024 so far and plan to launch another 15 rockets this year.
SpaceX may be by far the most prominent of the new space companies, but many smaller companies, especially Rocketlab are also punching above their weight relative to the old guard.
The issue was that all the incentives for Boeing were to stagnate. The government would happily sign blank checks to them as long as they kept saying "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand". It took SpaceX coming around and showing results to prove that while space is hard, it isn't as difficult and slow as old space would have liked us to continue believing.
>> "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand"
There's a fantastic clip out there where Gwynne Shotwell is asked by someone (I think in congress) how they are able to launch so cheap. Her answer was approximately "I don't know how to build a four hundred million dollar rocket."
> There's really only one space company in the US today
This is just categorically false. There are many space companies. Launch isn't the only thing that happening in space.
But yes, SpaceX in terms of launch and operational sats dwarfs everybody to a degree that is unprecedented.
But there is a lot of money flowing in and many former SpaceXers have created lots of companies. Rocket companies, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, ABL. Lunar companies like Astrobotics. Transport companies like Impulse Space.
I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment. Yes Space-X has had the most launches and gets the most press, but the US has a very healthy launch industry.
For all of these others, considering that this article is from 2022, how many of them even still exist?
Don't get me wrong, I hope SpaceX gets some stiff competition because I believe that competition breeds innovation. At the moment, however, I have no idea where that is going to come from or when it might reasonably come.
When/if SpaceX gets Starship operational, small outfits like Rocket Lab won't be able to compete. ULA will probably survive in some form though either due to being a well established in Washington (read: old trusted corruption), or through a merger with Blue Origin (read: bailed out by Bezos.)
What would a healthy launch industry look like? I don't think that 2022 article necessarily describes one. There is the long bet that won (SpaceX, reuse), the dino (ULA), a NZ transplant still mostly launching outside the US (RocketLab), some hopeful looking startups and always over the horizon Blue Origin.
This is a much better situation than the EU caught between the unpalatable antique (Soyuz) and the sailboat waiting for a cargo (Ariane 6).
However, it doesn't seem as healthy as the Chinese launch industry, which seems to have many providers launching and iterating with differentiated designs [0], bread-and-butter heavy launches from Long Marches (48 in 2023) [1] and continued work with the Tiangong space station [2]. It doesn't quite compute for me that commies don't have everything under proletarian central control, but they sure seem to be letting a hundred flowers bloom for now.
> If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020.
How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century? Granted it's not the same thing as rockets, but still, with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?
SpaceX was able to accomplish it because they were actually trying. They quickly became the company to go to if you entered aerospace primarily to work yourself hard doing R&D, so they got all the best young aerospace engineers who just wanted to get things done rather than have their soul crushed by the bureacracy at the old space giants.
Meanwhile Boeing and the other old guard were full of jaded "it isn't that easy" types. It's difficult to innovate when your instinctual response to attempts at innovation is to look for excuses on how it won't be that straightforward, that it won't be economical, or that it won't make sense.
Eg, if we look at Falcon 9, first the arguments from old space companies were that launching to orbit is too difficult for an inexperienced company to do reliably ("they don't have spaceflight heritage"), then that they must be cutting corners to bring prices that low, then in the early days of F9 booster reuse, the argument shifted to saying that there wasn't enough stuff to launch to justify the expense (there was the ULA CEO's argument that, for them it'd take 10 flights per booster to break even or ArianeSpace's saying that they'd have to shut down the factories and lose expertise becuase they'd only need a handful of reusable boosters to fully meet demand).
Prior to the pandemic and the 737Max debacle, though, Boeing would low-bid fixed-price contracts and eat the losses because their commercial aircraft business would cover it, then make up the difference with continued sales. https://www.defenseone.com/business/2022/04/boeings-low-ball...
The only folks who weren't trying here were senior management, who were unable to do anything that wasn't milking the cost-plus contract cow.
> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?
Two factors, IMHO. First and biggest one is by being a private company operating on its own budget authority. Basically, SpaceX was free to work in whatever way they wanted - a 180° turn from "established" practice both at NASA and ESA and the political decision makers that the billions of dollars of expenses had to be distributed across the continent fairly to help politicians get reelected. That means instead of dealing with shit tons of suppliers, wasting insane amounts of money on tenders, specification documents and whatnot, SpaceX went in-house for as much as they could, in very very few locations on top of that to save on shipping.
The second one is ossification. Boeing, Airbus, EADS, the major carmakers - they all got big by perfecting (sometimes centuries) old designs by iteration: airframes, cars, combustion engines, rockets, you name it. Straying from the beaten path comes with very high internal risk for anyone involved, and so very little true innovation happens. SpaceX in contrast operated on a green field - a ton of money and a general attitude of "you're free to do whatever the fuck you want, and failures are expected along the path".
Eventually, no doubt there, SpaceX and Tesla will both ossify as well, it's a trap for any large organization - and we're seeing signs with Tesla already, with attention going to the Cybertruck instead of getting the issues with existing models (e.g. fabrication tolerances, spare part availability) under control first.
It's easy for old, incumbent companies to become ossified, where their internal culture and bureaucracy and processes are hilariously inefficient. At any given time, there will be some people pushing back on that, but there will always be more people there who are okay with it -- because the ones who couldn't handle the ossification left, while the people who were okay with it stayed. Survivorship bias, in other words; sometimes this is called the Dead Sea effect: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-... (this article talks about it in terms of IT competence, but you can easily apply it to other aspects of a business' culture)
That's why it's so important for it to be easy for new entrants to start up in an economic sector. You need them to pressure the old guard, or failing that, to replace them.
Boeing is definitely in on it, but let's be clear, the gov as a consumer was not really asking for 100 launches a year, and was not in the business of paying for the change necessary to completely reinvent lift as a service. So why wouldn't they just keep charging what they were charging, and building what they always did.
There just wasn't an appetite for risk and reinvention, at least not enough to bring it down and start over, the way an eccentric billionaire could.
IIRC, large primes have limited IRAD funding for the most part - in some cases fixed %, so to do research you have to charge more to the Gov. That's just plain a "cost saving measure" enacted by government.
> with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?
Boeing were reverse-acquired by Douglas Aircraft (after they'd reverse-acquired McDonnell) and their terrible quarterly-numbers management has destroyed a lot of Boeing's engineering. But the stock price kept going up which is the important thing, right?
Look at a company after about 30 years and basically everybody that was there before, is gone. You keep the same name, the same brand, but all the people are entirely different. And people are, by far, the most important factor in the capabilities of a company. And often times people just aren't really replaceable. But you have to replace them, nonetheless, and so you just end up with something entirely different, even if it has the same name.
An even better example than Boeing is the Apollo program. The degree of competence, efficiency, and speed of that program all under NASA - is completely unlike anything we've ever seen anytime before, or since. JFK gave his 'to the Moon' speech in late 1962, when our grand achievement in space had been nothing beyond on briefly sending a man to orbit just a few months earlier. Less than 7 years later (!!), the first man would set foot on the Moon. The entire Apollo program cost $179 billion over 11 years (inflation adjusted), for a total of $16 billion per year. Their latest annual budget was $25 billion.
Boeing is a grossly inefficient organization, have been for a while. It's not just them, this is typical of the defense contractor side of the house for companies like them. It doesn't help that they're getting the high publicity contracts, lots of low publicity contracts that go about as well and are run about as poorly.
> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?
I have no particular insight into this subject, but an Ars article [1] from yesterday offers some speculation:
'"The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding," said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program [...]'
and
'SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing's space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company's problem—they were NASA's. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price. Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment.'
> Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?
Definitely part of the reason. They did poach a lot of good people.
SpaceX vs Gov Contractors been the war cry of those who believe Private >> Contractors. Everything Elon has done for SpaceX has been absolutely relentless,
and razor focused on the goal. This includes being willing to sacrifice individual's life-balance for the mission. Combine all that with a willingness to do fast iteration and break things where it's "safe" to do so. You've got the ability to disrupt an industry/ecosystem that's gotten lazy and fat over time.
To be clear, Private >> Contractors is not 100% nor is the flip. There are too many examples of both directions either working or not working.
>> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time
Because they already had Dragon sending cargo to the ISS at the start of the commercial crew program. They used the money to upgrade and get man rated. Boeing started their capsule from scratch. This still doesn't explain all of it, but nobody else has mentioned their head start.
Boeing has been building stuff for space since the early days of the Apollo program, including the Space Shuttle and big slabs of the ISS. If anything they should have had a head start on anything human rated.
While that experienced helped, its not as as simple. The Crew Dragon was far more then just man rating the Cargo Dragon. It was a complete redesign, the structure is totally different. And the really hard part are things like the Launch escape system, SpaceX actually developed new engine from the ground, Boeing didn't.
SpaceX also got far less money, Boeing received like 80% more money.
ULA started a long time ago before SpaceX. It's really unfair to say Boeing doesn't have a head start. if anything, ULA/Boeing failed because their leadership
Likely sunk cost fallacy. Space flight is still new enough that starting from scratch lets you use all the lessons that were learned from your predecessors while not getting stuck in the muck of institutional inertia. And you still aren't that far behind the more experienced competition. Unlike say, a commodity like candles that doesn't have anything new to discover, and the existing manufactures cannot be out innovated.
I know a lot of people here hate Musk but he's actually pretty good at the rocket stuff. If you see him going around being interviewed on Everyday Astronaut he knows the design and trade offs of every part. I doubt you'd see that with Boeing management. It's a bit of a shame he's shifted to ranting on Twitter/X.
That's nothing to do with SpaceX specifically. The same applies to any American company building long range rockets. The government classifies this as weapons technology, and so it falls under ITAR - the International Traffic in Arms Regulations [1]. And hiring a foreign employee (or even a multi-national employee) is considered equivalent to a transfer of the underlying technology to that individual's home country or countries. In cases where this would be unlawful, which is most, hiring such persons would be unlawful.
There is nothing sensationalist. The flight was scrubbed. The headline didn't make any mention of the reason, the fact is literally, the flight attempt was a scrub.
It's definitely accurate to the facts, but twisted to try and paint a certain narrative given the current trends. Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
The headline could be an infinite number of ways more descriptive instead of riding on the coattails of the Boeing bash bandwagon:
"ULA scrubs launch of first crewed Boeing Starliner due to faulty valve in Atlas V."
"Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed due to faulty valve in launch vehicle."
I call bullshit on you. It was a perfectly fine headline. That they've tied Starliner to Atlas 5 is not something that was forced on them, so Boeing and Starliner gets to own the consequences.
In case it hasn’t been obvious, Boeing has been in the news over the last few months for various airplane defects.
I fail to see how it’s unreasonable to believe a journalist wouldn’t want to utilize the negative undertones of the Boeing name here, considering this would not an unusual pattern to utilize for headline writing.
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Yes, Elon is right, SpaceX did it cheaper, faster everything that you'd dream of. But, from a policy making standpoint, you always need to diversify at the expense of upfront money because the downsides risks are too high if you put all your eggs in one basket.
That said - I do wish Boeing+ULA would get it's act together. Because nearly 80%+ cost to the tax payer for hedging is quite expensive. US Gov definitely enables this.
I've said contradicting statements. My conclusion is, this is overall net positive even if pricy.
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