Holy shit. At this moment it really feels like Boarding just need to start at the top and fucking fire everyone involved with safety standards and manufacturing.
Who cares what Boeing does, the solution is simply to stop giving them contracts. Let them work out how to reimagine their company, just not on our dollar.
This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.
Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I’d rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we’ll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.
Also, not defending the Musk shitstain, but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.
Let me know how that interview goes, because if the rocket you developed and spent billions of dollars building explodes at launch, you’re going to be looking for a new line of work.
I’m sure the next aeronautics company will totally understand. Mondays, am I right?
See, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you keep showing more and more that you’re not following what’s happening in the launch business at all.
So for coming up on 10 years now, SpaceX has been absolutely kicking everyone’s ass. China is now coming up on being second.
They’re following processes of rapid iteration. During design, they build quickly (and relatively cheaply). They launch frequently. Those launches may not go perfectly. Sometimes they explode. But they get a LOT of data. This helps them iterate quickly.
This is different from what Boeing, Blue Origin, etc have been doing (and at different points, at NASA’s direction) - the “try to build it slow but steady, and perfect the first time” method. Guess what? That has been working horribly. It takes way way longer, costs way way more, etc. And they’ve left the door open for SpaceX to take over. They’re quickly becoming the ONLY game in town. And neither they nor, say, Blue Origin have really been focused that much on profit.
Rapid Iteration is also what we did early on in the space program. A lot of stuff failed (blew up) but we were making REALLY rapid progress.
Now - once the rockets go into production, they absolutely CAN’T blow up. ESPECIALLY with people inside. That’s a totally different thing.
SpaceX just lost had their first operation failure in like a decade. After hundreds of successful launches. It’s the best record I believe any rocket series has ever had.
You also picked tbe Shuttle as an example of things working well. It’s ironic - that’s specifically when everything started turning to shit - massive cost overruns, massive, years-long project delays. The delays for manned spaceflight, for launch systems, were a brand new thing starting with STS.
Blowing shit up is absolutely a valid part of the learning/development phase of rocket design.
Okay, you’ve made some pretty salient points. I’m not too proud to admit that my understanding of the topic is limited. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me more on the subject.
Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money?
I mean, spaceX has a fantastic track record. In their entire history, they only once failed to deliver a payload to orbit, and that was like just a month ago that they had their first failure after well over 300 successful launches. That’s record setting reliability in orbital rockets.
They blow up a lot of rockets in testing and development, but that’s kind of just how rocket development goes. It’s the same for NASA, Russia, and everyone else who designs rockets. You blow some up during development.
I’m just saying, I’m not sure you can lump SpaceX and Boeing together, they’re very different companies with very different track records.
This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector.
While I like the sentiment, you should know that you are absolutely, completely, 100% wrong.
The space shuttle was the deadliest spacecraft in human history, not just in the US, but in the entire world. And mind you, NASA spacecrafts are all also quite literally built from parts delivered by the lowest bidder.
For the record Boeing sucks and is doing a pretty crappy job right now, but regardless, it would be safer to launch on the Starliner 20 times in a row than to ride in the space shuttle once. At least the Starliner has a launch escape system.
To be fair to the shuttle though, it is objectively cool. While not a good way to get to space, that thing was awesome in every sense! I truly wish I had gotten to see it launch in person. Also the RS-25, the main engine, is a pretty badass rocket engine, there was so much about that vehicle that was great, it’s a shame that it never quite fulfilled its promise.
There is a reason we moved this to the private sector. Govt bureaucrats can’t get out of their own way and every project triples in cost, with no single person calling the shots to get the job done. Govt cannot keep up with the pace we need.
Boeing is hot garbage.
SpaceX has a shit face, but they are incredibly competent and effective at iterating their way to space.
NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.
Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.
I agree with everything you say and I am all about the way that you captured the dysfunction of the political apparatus and its inability to deliver for a price and on a date. I think my argument is that that’s exactly why the government should not be in charge of this stuff. It should not be political. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid billboards in space, but at least we’ll be able to finally get out there.
The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?
Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.
Boeing was one of my accounts back before the pandemic. I had to respond to RFPs where my employer sold services to Boeing. They sucked to work with and just didn’t understand really basic things about the services they were requesting in their own RFPs.
Disney and Walmart on the other hand were great. They were not pushovers, but they were consistently friendly, and they always knew their shit.
Well that’s nothing new - I worked for them “briefly” (as in weeks - ended up with a better job offer!!) and as an actual aircraft mechanic I was disgusted by what I saw - they had supervising roles filled with non-aircraft trades people, training was done by a former boat mechanic, there were butchers and carpenters - who, if you asked them thought they were far more capable than an aircraft mechanic as, actual aircraft trades are considered “problematic” by Boeing management (who are all ex Toyota staff for the most part…) because - aircraft mechanics are too slow for a production line environment as we tend to take our time too much for their liking (oh because we want to get it right first time?!) 🤦🏼♀️
I left and a week later the Max was grounded - the garbage that was spewing from senior management right before the grounding was eye roll inducing - about how they stand by the product bla bla bla and have no idea how shiny new aircraft could just fall out the sky……of course we know how that turned out for them….
But yeah, Boeing, like Rolls Royce are not the brand a lot of people should think of as “high quality” until they sort their QA shit out and start employing actual aircraft tradespeople and engineeers who know what they are doing 🤷🏼♀️
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Holy shit. At this moment it really feels like Boarding just need to start at the top and fucking fire everyone involved with safety standards and manufacturing.
Who cares what Boeing does, the solution is simply to stop giving them contracts. Let them work out how to reimagine their company, just not on our dollar.
…there are no rules in space
…to the surprise of absolutely no one.
This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.
Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I’d rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we’ll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.
Who do you think built the shuttle…?
Also, not defending the Musk shitstain, but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.
That wasn’t the focus of my post, but are you suggesting that there is a nonzero number of rocket explosions that would be considered acceptable?
I don’t need to be Elon Musk, or even know much about the space industry or development to know that the target number should always be zero.
…yes? During development specifically. Of course there is.
Let me know how that interview goes, because if the rocket you developed and spent billions of dollars building explodes at launch, you’re going to be looking for a new line of work.
I’m sure the next aeronautics company will totally understand. Mondays, am I right?
See, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you keep showing more and more that you’re not following what’s happening in the launch business at all.
So for coming up on 10 years now, SpaceX has been absolutely kicking everyone’s ass. China is now coming up on being second.
They’re following processes of rapid iteration. During design, they build quickly (and relatively cheaply). They launch frequently. Those launches may not go perfectly. Sometimes they explode. But they get a LOT of data. This helps them iterate quickly.
This is different from what Boeing, Blue Origin, etc have been doing (and at different points, at NASA’s direction) - the “try to build it slow but steady, and perfect the first time” method. Guess what? That has been working horribly. It takes way way longer, costs way way more, etc. And they’ve left the door open for SpaceX to take over. They’re quickly becoming the ONLY game in town. And neither they nor, say, Blue Origin have really been focused that much on profit.
Rapid Iteration is also what we did early on in the space program. A lot of stuff failed (blew up) but we were making REALLY rapid progress.
Now - once the rockets go into production, they absolutely CAN’T blow up. ESPECIALLY with people inside. That’s a totally different thing.
SpaceX just lost had their first operation failure in like a decade. After hundreds of successful launches. It’s the best record I believe any rocket series has ever had.
You also picked tbe Shuttle as an example of things working well. It’s ironic - that’s specifically when everything started turning to shit - massive cost overruns, massive, years-long project delays. The delays for manned spaceflight, for launch systems, were a brand new thing starting with STS.
Blowing shit up is absolutely a valid part of the learning/development phase of rocket design.
Okay, you’ve made some pretty salient points. I’m not too proud to admit that my understanding of the topic is limited. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me more on the subject.
Man, this has been a nice day full of niceness. It’s just…nice.
Have a good weekend, furbag. You’re a classy dude/ette.
I mean, spaceX has a fantastic track record. In their entire history, they only once failed to deliver a payload to orbit, and that was like just a month ago that they had their first failure after well over 300 successful launches. That’s record setting reliability in orbital rockets.
They blow up a lot of rockets in testing and development, but that’s kind of just how rocket development goes. It’s the same for NASA, Russia, and everyone else who designs rockets. You blow some up during development.
I’m just saying, I’m not sure you can lump SpaceX and Boeing together, they’re very different companies with very different track records.
While I like the sentiment, you should know that you are absolutely, completely, 100% wrong.
The space shuttle was the deadliest spacecraft in human history, not just in the US, but in the entire world. And mind you, NASA spacecrafts are all also quite literally built from parts delivered by the lowest bidder.
For the record Boeing sucks and is doing a pretty crappy job right now, but regardless, it would be safer to launch on the Starliner 20 times in a row than to ride in the space shuttle once. At least the Starliner has a launch escape system.
To be fair to the shuttle though, it is objectively cool. While not a good way to get to space, that thing was awesome in every sense! I truly wish I had gotten to see it launch in person. Also the RS-25, the main engine, is a pretty badass rocket engine, there was so much about that vehicle that was great, it’s a shame that it never quite fulfilled its promise.
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There is a reason we moved this to the private sector. Govt bureaucrats can’t get out of their own way and every project triples in cost, with no single person calling the shots to get the job done. Govt cannot keep up with the pace we need.
Boeing is hot garbage.
SpaceX has a shit face, but they are incredibly competent and effective at iterating their way to space.
NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.
Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.
I agree with everything you say and I am all about the way that you captured the dysfunction of the political apparatus and its inability to deliver for a price and on a date. I think my argument is that that’s exactly why the government should not be in charge of this stuff. It should not be political. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid billboards in space, but at least we’ll be able to finally get out there.
The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?
Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.
this will keep happening if you don’t put people in prison for it.
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of course. the prison is for people who steal hundreds, not millions.
Every company is trying for the most unqualified workforce these days… but at least most of them don’t involve flight.
Boeing was one of my accounts back before the pandemic. I had to respond to RFPs where my employer sold services to Boeing. They sucked to work with and just didn’t understand really basic things about the services they were requesting in their own RFPs.
Disney and Walmart on the other hand were great. They were not pushovers, but they were consistently friendly, and they always knew their shit.
Really? Well now aint that a surprise? /s
Unbridled capitalism sucks ass.
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Sounds like Boeing is being run by an unqualified work force
They get their best people from the 737 production and engineering for rocket building.
I still hate that NAA ended up in Boeing’s hands after only two buyouts.
Totally nothing wrong with an aerospace company buying out its competitors and then promptly liquidating its assets.
Google does it all the time!
Well that’s nothing new - I worked for them “briefly” (as in weeks - ended up with a better job offer!!) and as an actual aircraft mechanic I was disgusted by what I saw - they had supervising roles filled with non-aircraft trades people, training was done by a former boat mechanic, there were butchers and carpenters - who, if you asked them thought they were far more capable than an aircraft mechanic as, actual aircraft trades are considered “problematic” by Boeing management (who are all ex Toyota staff for the most part…) because - aircraft mechanics are too slow for a production line environment as we tend to take our time too much for their liking (oh because we want to get it right first time?!) 🤦🏼♀️
I left and a week later the Max was grounded - the garbage that was spewing from senior management right before the grounding was eye roll inducing - about how they stand by the product bla bla bla and have no idea how shiny new aircraft could just fall out the sky……of course we know how that turned out for them….
But yeah, Boeing, like Rolls Royce are not the brand a lot of people should think of as “high quality” until they sort their QA shit out and start employing actual aircraft tradespeople and engineeers who know what they are doing 🤷🏼♀️
Yeah, ask the two US astronauts that are stuck on ISS about that.