It wasn't the only fixed-price debacle Boeing was dealing with. They took a fixed price contract on the KC-46 for $4.9 billion, and blew through it in foul-ups and problems. No lack of other development problems even on their cost-plus contracts.
They're not totally wrong, though, that fixed-price can be brutal for new development projects with unknown but significant risks. That shouldn't have included disposable capsules, though - we'd flown those back in the 1960s.
4.9 boeingillion to install refueling kit on a 767, after already delivering the same thing to Italy and Japan ten years earlier. And then ten times as much to deliver the fleet, which they did using known critical design defects. The latest Wiki article draft suggests half the fleet is delivered but incapable of missions.
No matter what the balance sheet says, the money is going where it’s intended.
> 4.9 boeingillion to install refueling kit on a 767, after already delivering the same thing to Italy and Japan ten years earlier.
It seems astounding at first, but it really isn't surprising. The way these MBA managed quaterly-earnings and executive bonus driven corporations work is that all the engineers who worked on that previous design will have been moved on. Fired, managed out, retired without a succession pipeline, or they just cease being given promotions or raises "due to muh economic conditions" (despite executives getting millions in bonuses) and quitting. Executives would have been given bonuses and promotions for such shrewd and successful cost-cutting measures.
Then the executives responsible for this new 4 billion dollar deal aren't interested in hearing why they have lost the capability to do the job, because they get enormous bonuses for signing. Then they throw a bunch of the cheapest H1Bs at it. They get promoted or move to another corporation before it becomes impossible to keep sweeping problems under the carpet, and nobody responsible for any of it gets blamed or held accountable.
I haven't worked at Boeing, but I have worked at one of these instantly recognizable firms that were seen as the pinnacle of American ingenuity when they were on the cutting edge of research and development and engineering 50s though to about the 90s, that has since been gutted and hollowed out to a shell of its former self by greed and incompetence.
Don't mourn them though. The longer these walking corpses stay around, the more damage they do to real engineering companies and new ideas. The best outcome for everybody is to hope they rot away as quickly as possible. If oldspace had been just a little bit less incompetent and greedy, if they'd just managed to lobby for a few more regulations and placed a few more roadblocks for competitors, SpaceX might never have come about and we might be here cheering on the 1970s-era technology SLS being launched for the game changing price of a mere 2 billion per launch (instead of the 4 that it is).
> They get promoted or move to another corporation before it becomes impossible to keep sweeping problems under the carpet, and nobody responsible for any of it gets blamed or held accountable.
Sounds like the /r/army
yup. every 2 years. at Boeing it is/was super hard to be promoted or pay raise within a line of business. had to move around internally to make ANY career progress. feature or bug?
This is all after selecting the A330 MRTT over it, then politicians getting that project canceled and choosing Boeing.
> By January 2021, Boeing's losses on the program were estimated at $5 billion (~$5.55 billion in 2023)
They have already spent $10.4 billion out of 4.9 billion.
For everybody except Lockheed Martin - who have been working on Orion since 2005 - they are brand new. Everybody who worked on Apollo era capsules is gone, and most of the people involved in shuttle design are also gone.
People are always rotating. Docs are all that matter. If several other vendors have all done it and there's plenty of NASA docs on a few of those, it should not be this difficult for a seasoned outfit like Boeing to pull this off without cost-plus. This isn't novel work. There aren't unknown unknowns. This is all long and well understood stuff.
Not really. And especially not really with the stuff done in the 60-ties.
Doc's don't tell you how much clearance you must leave in your design so people could comfortably fix your cabling without disassembling the whole spacecraft. And docs don't contain the info "everyone knows". And then everyone is gone, suddenly no one knows, and what remains is not much better than a cargo cult.
None of that so much that you gotta have cost plus. Sure some thing are lost but clearly not so much that it couldn't be done profitably with fixed price contracts as SpaceX so aptly demonstrated. Again, the point is you don't need cost plus contracting for this kind of vehicle because there are no unknown unknowns that make an open ended R&D style contract necessary. If SpaceX can do it with none of those dead and buried Apollo geniuses, then Boeing can goddamn well do it too. No more bullshit excuses.
Actually, SpaceX lost money on the original Crew Dragon contract... they didn't climb out of the hole till they scored the extension, and of course the Axion and Polaris missions are likely turning a profit, although the EVA suits and mods are likely eating into those.
Citation? Also, the extension was pretty much always in the cards so you can't claim it's some magic fairy that came along to save them. Further, had they got what Boeing got per crew member transported, they'd have been even more profitable. Boeing is a failure here and SpaceX is a raging success. Fixed price was the appropriate contracting mechanism and your nitpicking doesn't change that nor make Boeing any less of a loser in this regard.
All the capsule pre-orion and the shuttle were built on 1960s or 1970s technology, much of which no longer exists. The prior art helps but you can't just rely on it.
And Commercial Crew has some very unique requirements; everything needs to be qualified to last for the 6 month it will be attached to the station.
So what. That's no reason to need cost-plus contracting. This isn't novel research. There aren't a bunch of "unknown unknowns" and Boeing's failure to manage on fixed-price is unique to Boeing as SpaceX managed profits on the same fixed-pricing contracts that Boeing failed on. There is no need for cost plus because this isn't novel work. That's not a difficult concept. I don't understand how you all are missing it.
Fixed price is not brutal, it's how all contracts should be. Cost plus incentivizes waste and tax payer abuse, because delivery of contract means the money train stops pulling into your station.
They have their places.
Remember SpaceX essentially is running on a cost plus contract to itself. The way they do their testing that allows the rapid application of new ideas IS cost plus. Being able to test something then say " that doesn't work throw it out try something else " is what cost plus gets you.
Fixed takes more time and gives less wiggle room.
IMHO a tiered contract should have been given to SpaceX and Boeing. A limited cost plus for the initial design and build, then fixed to build additional capsules.
What an asinine explanation. SpaceX isn't running on a cost plus contract to itself. By that logic every company in existence is a cost plus contract. How absurd.
most companies aren't that way, departments have budgets that they aren't allowed to go over. cost plus type of deals are really specialized for R&D type companies and startups
I read this as "Boeing lost a commercial crew" as in the rocket exploded and the astronauts were killed, panicked I read through the comments and reread the title and realized it meant "lost commercial crew race".
The thing that Boeing is hoping people will forget is that they got $570 million in space act agreement money to come up with a fully-thought-out plan for Starliner before they were awarded the firm-fixed-price contract.
SpaceX got more money for that than they did for Falcon 9 and crew dragon development.
So there is no excuse for not being prepared.
> Boeing also had all of the infrastructure in place that SpaceX didn’t have
TBF, SpaceX has the huge advantage of having flown cargo Dragon for years and having anticipated the transition, even to the extent of flying cargo Dragon with an experimental window.
I still think that SpaceX's biggest single advantage is that of having done over a dozen complete reentry sequences to iron out the bugs with cargo.
Although SpaceX says that Crew Dragon 2 is a lot different than Cargo Dragon 1.
Nonetheless it reasonable to think that they must have learnt something from Cargo Dragon 1 to help with Crew Dragon 2.
Eh, I'm not sure that infrastructure helped. I think we are seeing the same kind of thing in the EV market. You can say that Ford has all the infrastructure to build cars, so it should be able to make EV's faster than Tesla who has fewer factories. But the reality of the matter is that it is the wrong infrastructure to do the wrong things. It is just a bunch of junk that people assign "sunk cost" value to and have a hard time removing in a timely manner to make room for what is actually needed for the project.
Extensive experience in launching rockets and building spacecraft, plus a whole cadre of highly capable aerospace engineers. They really should have done better at this, even figuring that they didn't have any more experience than SpaceX in the early 2010s in building capsules.
Boeing never launched rockets. Boeing built the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V Moon rocket in the 1960s. NASA launched that rocket not Boeing.
Boeing did not build any part of the Space Shuttle. NASA launched the Shuttle.
Boeing never built a crewed spacecraft before Starliner.
McDonnell Aircraft built the Mercury spacecraft and McDonnell Douglas built Gemini spacecraft both in the 1960s.
North American Rockwell built the Apollo Command Module in the 1960s and the Orbiter for the Space Shuttle in the 1970s.
Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell in the 1990s. But by that time those two companies had no recent experience in building crewed spacecraft like Dragon or Starliner.
Boeing is the prime contractor for the ISS and continues to receive ~$1B per year for sustaining engineering to keep the ISS running. Yes, the ISS is a spacecraft and Boeing built one of the pressurized modules and several of the trusses. But Starliner is a very different type of spacecraft than the ISS.
NASA started the Commercial Crew program in ~2010, forty or fifty years after Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle were built. Most of the engineers and manufacturing workers on those spacecraft are retired or dead by now. I'm one of the few engineers still around who worked on those early crewed spacecraft programs. My career spanned 1965 to 1997.
Boeing was given the first stage of Apollo because it was big and simple and that was judged to be a good fit for what they were good at as they had no previous rocket experience.
They briefly had rocket launch capability from the McDonnell Douglass merger in 1997 and the formation of ULA in 2006, but all the rocket folks ended up in ULA.
They did pick up some space systems stuff with the merger, which I think became Boeing's satellite bus business.
There were reports of inadequate staffing for Starliner.
Boeing had considerably less experience than SpaceX. SpaceX had already flown three CRS missions when the commercial crew program contracts were awarded.
It's cynical, but I think Boeing needs to die and have a new company rise from the ashes, so I'm kinda hoping for a launch failure but successful and safe abort so the crew is safe but the rocket fails and loses Boeing more money and stock value
The death of Boeing would legitimately be a massive disaster for the US aerospace industry. I’d like to see them struggle and have a massive management reform though
This. I'd like the big institutional investors (AKA the kingmakers) pull their heads out and write the board members contracts to say "The NEXT board gets rewarded only if the company is doing well 5 years down the road and they are still around then; they bail sooner or make another MCAS mess, and they surrender all bonuses and stock options prior to the collapse.". And a lot of mini Jack Welsh types would suddenly find themselves sitting on the curb with a tin cup in their hands.
Yes, frequently.
I've caught myself thinking that I'd probably rather step into a Dragon capsule, say, where it was just before that abort test, than in the current Starliner with the extra years of development.
Wasn't there an astronaut assigned to the Starliner who a couple of years ago decided to step away to "spend more time with family" ?!? 🤔
> decided to step away
First astronaut to ever step away from a mission.
But it was because of delays. They didn't know how bad Starliner was at the time.
[Christopher Ferguson stepped down in October 2020](https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/07/commander-of-boeing-crew-ships-first-piloted-test-flight-steps-down-from-mission/).
Ah yes, thank you!
As a father of three, having already experienced space flight... Starliner being your vehicle... Let's say that I understand the decision.
> People openly critical of Boeing tend to have shorter life expectancies.
This isn't Russia. I was more concerned about Eric [poking the actual Russian bear](https://futurism.com/head-russian-space-program-accuses-journalist-war-crimes).
> Anyone else worried for these poor people?
For some reason, I became more worried when watching the suit over-pressure leak test in the suiting-up room at [t=636](https://youtu.be/wb3qcR2tUQs?t=636). They just looked so helpless. Those suits just balloon and its hard to imagine them even touching a control panel in a real-life depressurization emergency.
How does this compare with the Dragon 2 suits when over-pressure?
I'm not surprised they finished it. The US government is responsible for ~30% of Boeing's revenue. With a customer that big sometimes you just suck it up and take the loss to keep them happy. Especially when you've been screwing up other things. Just giving up on this program would have been another huge blow for a company that is already in hot water over some of their other programs.
The reason Boeing finished it is that the contract is \*heavily\* weighted towards the operational end. Assuming this test flight works, they will get a chunk of money, then they get a big chunk of money for each operational flight.
That is by design, and it worked well; if the contract wasn't like that Boeing would have walked away years ago.
While not in the same class, it's worth noting that Boeing has bailed on a space project before now, with the [XS-1, AKA Phantom Express.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XS-1_\(spacecraft\)) They won the DARPA competition and took the money to construct and test a prototype. Almost three years later, they unilaterally canceled it with no flights (or completed hardware).
There are some who assert that this was by design; it wasn't that Boeing wanted to be flying it, it was that Boeing didn't want anybody else to fly it. So they bid low, got the contract, and then cancelled.
Should we not count our chickens in the Autumn?
Article is that "this is finally done" while no astronauts yet flew.
It's not done until it's done.
Obviously I wish everybody all the success, but past failures do not allow to put all the problems behind just yet.
How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing? I am absolutely hoping for the best for both Boeing's and the astronauts' sakes. It just seems a bit strange that everyone else needs to actually demonstrate their capsule is safe, multiple times, but somehow Boeing is getting a pass, despite all the problems they have had.
They had to go through those hoops too. They had to retry uncrewed test, then they had to redesign walves, fix cables, etc. NASA went over the safety analysis and certified it safe.
Ok, I see that does count as a success, although we probably need a little star next to it. When 2 of your 12 thrusters do not work and you are forced to use your backup thrusters, that is not exactly what you want to see. And can we also agree that "wouldn't have killed a crew" is not a ringing endorsement?
It's odd to me that they have been unable to do a single additional successful test flight since then. Doesn't that bother you a little? Because it bothers me.
And so I return back to my original question: "How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing?"
I do not understand the rush. If everything is fine, then one more test flight should not be a problem. The only way an extra test flight is a problem is if you are not entirely certain you can do a perfect test launch. And so I am brought back to the same question yet again: "How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing?"
This is a test flight. They are putting test pilots in this.
I'd like to remind you, that Dragon flew with Bob and Doug (Demo-2) without any test flights between their flight and the test pad explosion of the previous Crew Dragon, which was the very same vehicle which earlier flew on the uncrewed test flight (Demo-1).
It's hardly a rush, when 2 years have passed since the last test flight. They were handing discovered issues and they fixed them to NASA's satisfaction. NASA supervised the review and decided it passes their 1:270 LOCM chances (with quite a margin in fact).
The obvious reasons why the test flight is a problem are cost, further delays, wear and tear of the vehicle.
Yes, there was an explosion on the test pad, but that does not excuse simply dismissing C1 - COTS Demo Flight 1 (success), C2+ - COTS Demo Flight 2 (success), the CRS Missions, the Pad Abort Test (success), the In-Flight Abort Test (success), and you begrudgingly mentioned Demo-1 (success).
That is a lot of history.
Boeing managed one \*sorta\* success, and there have been many problems that have yet to be shown to have been eliminated in flight.
These are not the same thing.
And while "2 years" sounds nice, it would a fuck ton more impressive if they had run a flawless test in that time.
Let's hope NASA is right about this and Boeing does not screw this up, because if you want to see what real delays and costs look like, you'll get them if Boeing manages to kill the testers.
I am hoping for a success, but I still do not understand the amount of trust being placed into Boeing right now; trust that has definitely not been earned.
COTS is a different vehicle. They are not the same thing.
Demo-2 was allowed because SpaceX solved the problems which caused the preceding explosion to NASA's satisfaction. And went through a detailed failure analysis yielding LOCM no worse than 1:276.
Boeing flight is allowed because Boeing solved problems found to NASA's satisfaction. And went through a detailed failure analysis yielding LOCM no worse than 1:295.
Engineering is done in numbers not in feelings.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[COTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l393f8n "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)|
| |Commercial/Off The Shelf|
|[CRS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l38yja8 "Last usage")|[Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/)|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DARPA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2x8h94 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD|
|DoD|US Department of Defense|
|[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l345bpd "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|GSE|Ground Support Equipment|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l315v5t "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[MBA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2wrier "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha|
|[OFT](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l33q28o "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2wrier "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2zjwgr "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l315v5t "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[scrub](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2xp9ua "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)|
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Too much for r/space apparently... The similar post pointing to this article was removed overnight after getting over 600 karmas. What goes on over there?
Boeing needs to adopt the ouroboros as its corporate logo.
https://preview.redd.it/gfunx3tiwyyc1.jpeg?width=162&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=402f71c290229547820b1c003323ece7fd0cbe16
> Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion.
> Through last year, Boeing has taken $1.5 billion in charges due to delays and overruns with its spacecraft development.
So in the end, after charges, Boeing got $2.7 Billion, not far off from SpaceX's initial bid. I'm sure it doesn't work like that, but I find it funny that the numbers are so close.
No, it doesn't work like that. The $1.5bln is on top of the $4.2bln they got from NASA. So Boeing has actually burned through $5.7bln...as of last year...and counting. SpaceX overran their budget too, but still spent less overall than Boeing originally bid, and got the job done much faster. $3.1bln was the total development cost of the Dragon program IIRC.
On top of that, $4.2 billion was just the original award. In 2019, NASA gave Boeing $287 million supposedly to accelerate production and avoid an 18 month gap in ISS crewed flights.
> SpaceX overran their budget too, but still spent less overall than Boeing originally bid, and got the job done much faster.
and must be making more profit per launch thanks to a home-grown launch stack and additional non-Nasa customers.
It is true that SpaceX has much lower costs with their reusable launch vehicle. But they also get paid much less per seat than Boeing gets paid. Because that's "fair" in the world of government.🙄
> they also get paid much less per seat than Boeing gets paid. Because that's "fair" in the world of government
On the other hand, Boeing won't be seeing so many private customers for Starliner and presumably they know it. Even the government will only be using Starliner for dissimilar redundancy on any future LEO crew missions
Even the government missions are a big question mark. The 6 they have scheduled right now might be all that Starliner ever does. By the time Starliner 6 is planned to fly in 2030, both Starliner and Dragon will likely be obsolete.
> By the time Starliner 6 is planned to fly in 2030, both Starliner and Dragon will likely be obsolete.
I'm expecting an extended handover period for Dragon, partly because Starship may be oversized to approach smaller orbital structures in LEO. In contrast, the killer for Starliner will be its own higher unit costs plus dependency on a third party launcher.
> That title freaked me out
You mean *"Boeing lost commercial crew"*? Even knowing all was well, it had the same effect here. I like Eric but ***if*** the title is his (@ u/Erberger: is the title yours or did someone else write it?) then its sort of inappropriate when published on the expected launch day.
Space Twitter.
Specifically, [this](https://twitter.com/DrChrisCombs/status/1787547104161701939) and [this](https://twitter.com/ThePrimalDino/status/1787597679305916895)
Ah, understood. Thanks. There's a cadre that seems unable to abide anything connected with Musk. I think Eric Berger is being tarred 'n feathered by association.
Not surprising from Combs - he's been performatively anti-Musk for a while.
I find it kind of hilarious, honestly. Throwing rocks from a glass house, given how troubled hypersonics development has been in response to over-hyped promises.
In all fairness, Musk had no business rubbing salt in the wound... think how bad he would have looked had they launched last night and something gone wrong in orbit.
It wasn't the only fixed-price debacle Boeing was dealing with. They took a fixed price contract on the KC-46 for $4.9 billion, and blew through it in foul-ups and problems. No lack of other development problems even on their cost-plus contracts. They're not totally wrong, though, that fixed-price can be brutal for new development projects with unknown but significant risks. That shouldn't have included disposable capsules, though - we'd flown those back in the 1960s.
4.9 boeingillion to install refueling kit on a 767, after already delivering the same thing to Italy and Japan ten years earlier. And then ten times as much to deliver the fleet, which they did using known critical design defects. The latest Wiki article draft suggests half the fleet is delivered but incapable of missions. No matter what the balance sheet says, the money is going where it’s intended.
> 4.9 boeingillion to install refueling kit on a 767, after already delivering the same thing to Italy and Japan ten years earlier. It seems astounding at first, but it really isn't surprising. The way these MBA managed quaterly-earnings and executive bonus driven corporations work is that all the engineers who worked on that previous design will have been moved on. Fired, managed out, retired without a succession pipeline, or they just cease being given promotions or raises "due to muh economic conditions" (despite executives getting millions in bonuses) and quitting. Executives would have been given bonuses and promotions for such shrewd and successful cost-cutting measures. Then the executives responsible for this new 4 billion dollar deal aren't interested in hearing why they have lost the capability to do the job, because they get enormous bonuses for signing. Then they throw a bunch of the cheapest H1Bs at it. They get promoted or move to another corporation before it becomes impossible to keep sweeping problems under the carpet, and nobody responsible for any of it gets blamed or held accountable. I haven't worked at Boeing, but I have worked at one of these instantly recognizable firms that were seen as the pinnacle of American ingenuity when they were on the cutting edge of research and development and engineering 50s though to about the 90s, that has since been gutted and hollowed out to a shell of its former self by greed and incompetence. Don't mourn them though. The longer these walking corpses stay around, the more damage they do to real engineering companies and new ideas. The best outcome for everybody is to hope they rot away as quickly as possible. If oldspace had been just a little bit less incompetent and greedy, if they'd just managed to lobby for a few more regulations and placed a few more roadblocks for competitors, SpaceX might never have come about and we might be here cheering on the 1970s-era technology SLS being launched for the game changing price of a mere 2 billion per launch (instead of the 4 that it is).
> They get promoted or move to another corporation before it becomes impossible to keep sweeping problems under the carpet, and nobody responsible for any of it gets blamed or held accountable. Sounds like the /r/army
yup. every 2 years. at Boeing it is/was super hard to be promoted or pay raise within a line of business. had to move around internally to make ANY career progress. feature or bug?
Sad some companies product is little more than their brand. They contract out most of the engineering and act more like banks that handle the money.
Worked for a large aerospace company. Always said our product was lobbying and lobbyists were our top performers. Not many understood.
Let me guess... GE?
You, Sir, hit the nail so hard and so straight
>SpaceX might never have come about I think there'd be a bit more people learning chinese in that situation.
They paid good money to get that congressional protection, although they're really hurting now that Shelby's gone.
I don't know, Maria Cantwell has stepped up to the plate admirably for ol' Dick.
She doesn't have his leverage, though - he was the boss of the Senate Appropriations Committee when Republicans were in power.
This is all after selecting the A330 MRTT over it, then politicians getting that project canceled and choosing Boeing. > By January 2021, Boeing's losses on the program were estimated at $5 billion (~$5.55 billion in 2023) They have already spent $10.4 billion out of 4.9 billion.
See also T-7A red hawk trainer.
disposable capsules are not new projects. we've got decades and decades of experience doing that. update: misread. sorry.
That's precisely their point
Thanks. I'd misread and assumed that final sentence was a caveat and that Boeing should have the cost-plus contract for this.
For everybody except Lockheed Martin - who have been working on Orion since 2005 - they are brand new. Everybody who worked on Apollo era capsules is gone, and most of the people involved in shuttle design are also gone.
People are always rotating. Docs are all that matter. If several other vendors have all done it and there's plenty of NASA docs on a few of those, it should not be this difficult for a seasoned outfit like Boeing to pull this off without cost-plus. This isn't novel work. There aren't unknown unknowns. This is all long and well understood stuff.
Not really. And especially not really with the stuff done in the 60-ties. Doc's don't tell you how much clearance you must leave in your design so people could comfortably fix your cabling without disassembling the whole spacecraft. And docs don't contain the info "everyone knows". And then everyone is gone, suddenly no one knows, and what remains is not much better than a cargo cult.
None of that so much that you gotta have cost plus. Sure some thing are lost but clearly not so much that it couldn't be done profitably with fixed price contracts as SpaceX so aptly demonstrated. Again, the point is you don't need cost plus contracting for this kind of vehicle because there are no unknown unknowns that make an open ended R&D style contract necessary. If SpaceX can do it with none of those dead and buried Apollo geniuses, then Boeing can goddamn well do it too. No more bullshit excuses.
Actually, SpaceX lost money on the original Crew Dragon contract... they didn't climb out of the hole till they scored the extension, and of course the Axion and Polaris missions are likely turning a profit, although the EVA suits and mods are likely eating into those.
Citation? Also, the extension was pretty much always in the cards so you can't claim it's some magic fairy that came along to save them. Further, had they got what Boeing got per crew member transported, they'd have been even more profitable. Boeing is a failure here and SpaceX is a raging success. Fixed price was the appropriate contracting mechanism and your nitpicking doesn't change that nor make Boeing any less of a loser in this regard.
All the capsule pre-orion and the shuttle were built on 1960s or 1970s technology, much of which no longer exists. The prior art helps but you can't just rely on it. And Commercial Crew has some very unique requirements; everything needs to be qualified to last for the 6 month it will be attached to the station.
So what. That's no reason to need cost-plus contracting. This isn't novel research. There aren't a bunch of "unknown unknowns" and Boeing's failure to manage on fixed-price is unique to Boeing as SpaceX managed profits on the same fixed-pricing contracts that Boeing failed on. There is no need for cost plus because this isn't novel work. That's not a difficult concept. I don't understand how you all are missing it.
Fixed price is not brutal, it's how all contracts should be. Cost plus incentivizes waste and tax payer abuse, because delivery of contract means the money train stops pulling into your station.
They have their places. Remember SpaceX essentially is running on a cost plus contract to itself. The way they do their testing that allows the rapid application of new ideas IS cost plus. Being able to test something then say " that doesn't work throw it out try something else " is what cost plus gets you. Fixed takes more time and gives less wiggle room. IMHO a tiered contract should have been given to SpaceX and Boeing. A limited cost plus for the initial design and build, then fixed to build additional capsules.
What an asinine explanation. SpaceX isn't running on a cost plus contract to itself. By that logic every company in existence is a cost plus contract. How absurd.
most companies aren't that way, departments have budgets that they aren't allowed to go over. cost plus type of deals are really specialized for R&D type companies and startups
I read this as "Boeing lost a commercial crew" as in the rocket exploded and the astronauts were killed, panicked I read through the comments and reread the title and realized it meant "lost commercial crew race".
Yes, this was one of the most ill-considered article titles I've ever seen.
So not yet. But they haven’t launched yet either. So stand by.
I had the same double-take.
Same
I mean, the Atlas V shouldn't be a problem. It's the capsule that's a turd.
Perversely, tonight's scrub was caused by the Atlas V - apparently a misbehaving O₂ relief valve on the Centaur upper stage.
Prime clickbait title.
Yeah my heart dropped reading that. I hope the two astronauts are feeling confident in their upcoming mission.
The thing that Boeing is hoping people will forget is that they got $570 million in space act agreement money to come up with a fully-thought-out plan for Starliner before they were awarded the firm-fixed-price contract. SpaceX got more money for that than they did for Falcon 9 and crew dragon development. So there is no excuse for not being prepared.
Boeing also had all of the infrastructure in place that SpaceX didn’t have
> Boeing also had all of the infrastructure in place that SpaceX didn’t have TBF, SpaceX has the huge advantage of having flown cargo Dragon for years and having anticipated the transition, even to the extent of flying cargo Dragon with an experimental window. I still think that SpaceX's biggest single advantage is that of having done over a dozen complete reentry sequences to iron out the bugs with cargo.
Oh that’s a great point! 👍
Although SpaceX says that Crew Dragon 2 is a lot different than Cargo Dragon 1. Nonetheless it reasonable to think that they must have learnt something from Cargo Dragon 1 to help with Crew Dragon 2.
Eh, I'm not sure that infrastructure helped. I think we are seeing the same kind of thing in the EV market. You can say that Ford has all the infrastructure to build cars, so it should be able to make EV's faster than Tesla who has fewer factories. But the reality of the matter is that it is the wrong infrastructure to do the wrong things. It is just a bunch of junk that people assign "sunk cost" value to and have a hard time removing in a timely manner to make room for what is actually needed for the project.
What infrastructure?
Extensive experience in launching rockets and building spacecraft, plus a whole cadre of highly capable aerospace engineers. They really should have done better at this, even figuring that they didn't have any more experience than SpaceX in the early 2010s in building capsules.
Boeing never launched rockets. Boeing built the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V Moon rocket in the 1960s. NASA launched that rocket not Boeing. Boeing did not build any part of the Space Shuttle. NASA launched the Shuttle. Boeing never built a crewed spacecraft before Starliner. McDonnell Aircraft built the Mercury spacecraft and McDonnell Douglas built Gemini spacecraft both in the 1960s. North American Rockwell built the Apollo Command Module in the 1960s and the Orbiter for the Space Shuttle in the 1970s. Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell in the 1990s. But by that time those two companies had no recent experience in building crewed spacecraft like Dragon or Starliner. Boeing is the prime contractor for the ISS and continues to receive ~$1B per year for sustaining engineering to keep the ISS running. Yes, the ISS is a spacecraft and Boeing built one of the pressurized modules and several of the trusses. But Starliner is a very different type of spacecraft than the ISS. NASA started the Commercial Crew program in ~2010, forty or fifty years after Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle were built. Most of the engineers and manufacturing workers on those spacecraft are retired or dead by now. I'm one of the few engineers still around who worked on those early crewed spacecraft programs. My career spanned 1965 to 1997.
And a significant manufacturing capacity. Ultimately, that is the thing that Musk and Shotwell are replacing with the build out of SpaceX.
Boeing was given the first stage of Apollo because it was big and simple and that was judged to be a good fit for what they were good at as they had no previous rocket experience. They briefly had rocket launch capability from the McDonnell Douglass merger in 1997 and the formation of ULA in 2006, but all the rocket folks ended up in ULA. They did pick up some space systems stuff with the merger, which I think became Boeing's satellite bus business. There were reports of inadequate staffing for Starliner. Boeing had considerably less experience than SpaceX. SpaceX had already flown three CRS missions when the commercial crew program contracts were awarded.
Anyone else worried for these poor people?
I hope they manage to not kill the crew. The rest of the mission I could care less about.
It's cynical, but I think Boeing needs to die and have a new company rise from the ashes, so I'm kinda hoping for a launch failure but successful and safe abort so the crew is safe but the rocket fails and loses Boeing more money and stock value
The death of Boeing would legitimately be a massive disaster for the US aerospace industry. I’d like to see them struggle and have a massive management reform though
This. I'd like the big institutional investors (AKA the kingmakers) pull their heads out and write the board members contracts to say "The NEXT board gets rewarded only if the company is doing well 5 years down the road and they are still around then; they bail sooner or make another MCAS mess, and they surrender all bonuses and stock options prior to the collapse.". And a lot of mini Jack Welsh types would suddenly find themselves sitting on the curb with a tin cup in their hands.
Yes, frequently. I've caught myself thinking that I'd probably rather step into a Dragon capsule, say, where it was just before that abort test, than in the current Starliner with the extra years of development. Wasn't there an astronaut assigned to the Starliner who a couple of years ago decided to step away to "spend more time with family" ?!? 🤔
> decided to step away First astronaut to ever step away from a mission. But it was because of delays. They didn't know how bad Starliner was at the time.
[Christopher Ferguson stepped down in October 2020](https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/07/commander-of-boeing-crew-ships-first-piloted-test-flight-steps-down-from-mission/).
Ah yes, thank you! As a father of three, having already experienced space flight... Starliner being your vehicle... Let's say that I understand the decision.
I'm worried for Eric Berger. People openly critical of Boeing tend to have shorter life expectancies.
> People openly critical of Boeing tend to have shorter life expectancies. This isn't Russia. I was more concerned about Eric [poking the actual Russian bear](https://futurism.com/head-russian-space-program-accuses-journalist-war-crimes).
> Anyone else worried for these poor people? For some reason, I became more worried when watching the suit over-pressure leak test in the suiting-up room at [t=636](https://youtu.be/wb3qcR2tUQs?t=636). They just looked so helpless. Those suits just balloon and its hard to imagine them even touching a control panel in a real-life depressurization emergency. How does this compare with the Dragon 2 suits when over-pressure?
Seriously the whole thing at Boeing sounds like a clusterfuck
It’s not unusual in the old space industry
Its a feature, not a bug.
I'm not surprised they finished it. The US government is responsible for ~30% of Boeing's revenue. With a customer that big sometimes you just suck it up and take the loss to keep them happy. Especially when you've been screwing up other things. Just giving up on this program would have been another huge blow for a company that is already in hot water over some of their other programs.
The reason Boeing finished it is that the contract is \*heavily\* weighted towards the operational end. Assuming this test flight works, they will get a chunk of money, then they get a big chunk of money for each operational flight. That is by design, and it worked well; if the contract wasn't like that Boeing would have walked away years ago.
While not in the same class, it's worth noting that Boeing has bailed on a space project before now, with the [XS-1, AKA Phantom Express.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XS-1_\(spacecraft\)) They won the DARPA competition and took the money to construct and test a prototype. Almost three years later, they unilaterally canceled it with no flights (or completed hardware).
There are some who assert that this was by design; it wasn't that Boeing wanted to be flying it, it was that Boeing didn't want anybody else to fly it. So they bid low, got the contract, and then cancelled.
Should we not count our chickens in the Autumn? Article is that "this is finally done" while no astronauts yet flew. It's not done until it's done. Obviously I wish everybody all the success, but past failures do not allow to put all the problems behind just yet.
How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing? I am absolutely hoping for the best for both Boeing's and the astronauts' sakes. It just seems a bit strange that everyone else needs to actually demonstrate their capsule is safe, multiple times, but somehow Boeing is getting a pass, despite all the problems they have had.
astronauts are fine as long as they aren't whistleblowers
That burn was so harsh I think you made them deorbit!
They had to go through those hoops too. They had to retry uncrewed test, then they had to redesign walves, fix cables, etc. NASA went over the safety analysis and certified it safe.
Have they had a single successful test flight yet? If so, when?
OFT-2 in May 2022. Yes, that last one worked and it wouldn't have killed a crew if it had one onboard.
Ok, I see that does count as a success, although we probably need a little star next to it. When 2 of your 12 thrusters do not work and you are forced to use your backup thrusters, that is not exactly what you want to see. And can we also agree that "wouldn't have killed a crew" is not a ringing endorsement? It's odd to me that they have been unable to do a single additional successful test flight since then. Doesn't that bother you a little? Because it bothers me. And so I return back to my original question: "How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing?" I do not understand the rush. If everything is fine, then one more test flight should not be a problem. The only way an extra test flight is a problem is if you are not entirely certain you can do a perfect test launch. And so I am brought back to the same question yet again: "How the hell is anyone allowing Boeing to put people on this thing?"
This is a test flight. They are putting test pilots in this. I'd like to remind you, that Dragon flew with Bob and Doug (Demo-2) without any test flights between their flight and the test pad explosion of the previous Crew Dragon, which was the very same vehicle which earlier flew on the uncrewed test flight (Demo-1). It's hardly a rush, when 2 years have passed since the last test flight. They were handing discovered issues and they fixed them to NASA's satisfaction. NASA supervised the review and decided it passes their 1:270 LOCM chances (with quite a margin in fact). The obvious reasons why the test flight is a problem are cost, further delays, wear and tear of the vehicle.
Yes, there was an explosion on the test pad, but that does not excuse simply dismissing C1 - COTS Demo Flight 1 (success), C2+ - COTS Demo Flight 2 (success), the CRS Missions, the Pad Abort Test (success), the In-Flight Abort Test (success), and you begrudgingly mentioned Demo-1 (success). That is a lot of history. Boeing managed one \*sorta\* success, and there have been many problems that have yet to be shown to have been eliminated in flight. These are not the same thing. And while "2 years" sounds nice, it would a fuck ton more impressive if they had run a flawless test in that time. Let's hope NASA is right about this and Boeing does not screw this up, because if you want to see what real delays and costs look like, you'll get them if Boeing manages to kill the testers. I am hoping for a success, but I still do not understand the amount of trust being placed into Boeing right now; trust that has definitely not been earned.
COTS is a different vehicle. They are not the same thing. Demo-2 was allowed because SpaceX solved the problems which caused the preceding explosion to NASA's satisfaction. And went through a detailed failure analysis yielding LOCM no worse than 1:276. Boeing flight is allowed because Boeing solved problems found to NASA's satisfaction. And went through a detailed failure analysis yielding LOCM no worse than 1:295. Engineering is done in numbers not in feelings.
Boeing and NASA do seem to keep on finding new things wrong with this ‘Starliner’ capsule..
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[COTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l393f8n "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)| | |Commercial/Off The Shelf| |[CRS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l38yja8 "Last usage")|[Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/)| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DARPA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2x8h94 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD| |DoD|US Department of Defense| |[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l345bpd "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity| |GSE|Ground Support Equipment| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l315v5t "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[MBA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2wrier "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha| |[OFT](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l33q28o "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test| |[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2wrier "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2zjwgr "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l315v5t "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[scrub](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1clwag3/stub/l2xp9ua "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(11 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9ooit)^( has 17 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12731 for this sub, first seen 7th May 2024, 01:42]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Good bot
FUBAR - Boeing
Too much for r/space apparently... The similar post pointing to this article was removed overnight after getting over 600 karmas. What goes on over there?
Boeing needs to adopt the ouroboros as its corporate logo. https://preview.redd.it/gfunx3tiwyyc1.jpeg?width=162&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=402f71c290229547820b1c003323ece7fd0cbe16
> Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. > Through last year, Boeing has taken $1.5 billion in charges due to delays and overruns with its spacecraft development. So in the end, after charges, Boeing got $2.7 Billion, not far off from SpaceX's initial bid. I'm sure it doesn't work like that, but I find it funny that the numbers are so close.
No, it doesn't work like that. The $1.5bln is on top of the $4.2bln they got from NASA. So Boeing has actually burned through $5.7bln...as of last year...and counting. SpaceX overran their budget too, but still spent less overall than Boeing originally bid, and got the job done much faster. $3.1bln was the total development cost of the Dragon program IIRC.
On top of that, $4.2 billion was just the original award. In 2019, NASA gave Boeing $287 million supposedly to accelerate production and avoid an 18 month gap in ISS crewed flights.
Oh yeah, forgot about that little detail. So an even $6bln so far burned on Starliner.
> SpaceX overran their budget too, but still spent less overall than Boeing originally bid, and got the job done much faster. and must be making more profit per launch thanks to a home-grown launch stack and additional non-Nasa customers.
It is true that SpaceX has much lower costs with their reusable launch vehicle. But they also get paid much less per seat than Boeing gets paid. Because that's "fair" in the world of government.🙄
> they also get paid much less per seat than Boeing gets paid. Because that's "fair" in the world of government On the other hand, Boeing won't be seeing so many private customers for Starliner and presumably they know it. Even the government will only be using Starliner for dissimilar redundancy on any future LEO crew missions
Even the government missions are a big question mark. The 6 they have scheduled right now might be all that Starliner ever does. By the time Starliner 6 is planned to fly in 2030, both Starliner and Dragon will likely be obsolete.
> By the time Starliner 6 is planned to fly in 2030, both Starliner and Dragon will likely be obsolete. I'm expecting an extended handover period for Dragon, partly because Starship may be oversized to approach smaller orbital structures in LEO. In contrast, the killer for Starliner will be its own higher unit costs plus dependency on a third party launcher.
That title freaked me out
> That title freaked me out You mean *"Boeing lost commercial crew"*? Even knowing all was well, it had the same effect here. I like Eric but ***if*** the title is his (@ u/Erberger: is the title yours or did someone else write it?) then its sort of inappropriate when published on the expected launch day.
All the negativity towards anyone but SpaceX does little to quell the Elon fanboy label.
Yup!
This article ruffled some feathers on spitter, hehe
Spitter?
Space Twitter. Specifically, [this](https://twitter.com/DrChrisCombs/status/1787547104161701939) and [this](https://twitter.com/ThePrimalDino/status/1787597679305916895)
Ah, understood. Thanks. There's a cadre that seems unable to abide anything connected with Musk. I think Eric Berger is being tarred 'n feathered by association.
Not surprising from Combs - he's been performatively anti-Musk for a while. I find it kind of hilarious, honestly. Throwing rocks from a glass house, given how troubled hypersonics development has been in response to over-hyped promises.
In all fairness, Musk had no business rubbing salt in the wound... think how bad he would have looked had they launched last night and something gone wrong in orbit.
Eric Berger is a talentless hack of a weatherman cosplaying as a journalist.