Yeah but, no, but... 'Overpaid' Boeing snaps back at NASA's watchdog The Arianespace launch may have been delayed, but there remained plenty to bring delight to the hearts of rocket fans last week as Starliner neared launch and Boeing bit back at NASA. Boeing's Starliner has been mated to an Atlas V The Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule took another step toward space last week as the spacecraft …
So Boeing's decades of prior experience in rocket science counts for nothing against the Space X upstart getting a bit of a head start on the current generation of craft?
Too stupid or too lazy to learn from past experience, or is it just that they no longer have real management and are run instead by bean counters and marketing wanks?
Probably that like NASA itself it failed to maintain institutional memory. Letting experienced engineers retire without training replacements and dumping old plans and blueprints in a dumpster.
Also I expect if you acquire the expertise by buying a company it is much easier to not value their institutional memory or look after their archives properly.
Medicine does a better job than engineering in this respect. I was talking to a current 4th year med student recently and was gratified to learn they still teach them to take blood pressure the old fashioned way with a stethoscope and a column of mercury despite the existence of modern automated devices.
This is because there are people paid to imagine how things like medicine will work in natural disaster scenarios. You could find yourself operating in a tent in the hospital grounds under lamplight with the generators only able to run fridges and freezers and lifesaving machines.
For the same reason information like blood group are still hand written on blood bags for transfusion.
I get that including serviceable parts adds weight and is hostage to advances in technology but the institutional memory thing is something we should be able to solve in the Information Age. SpaceX will encounter it as well when their current crop of smart people retire. Will they forget how to do the recovery fins down landing thing? They will if they don't take care to remember.
Although I generally agree with your post, I must say that I do not believe NASA has thrown away any blueprint or plan for whatever it may have had.
You might be referring to the fact that we don't know how to make the Saturn V's engines any more, but it has been amply demonstrated now that that is not a case of having thrown anything away, it is a case of losing what you correctly referred to as institutional knowledge.
Oh come on, what's the National Security issue there ? Do you think you can possibly be more ridiculous than when NASA borked a landing because descent velocity was described in feet instead of meters ? Did someone leave a scarf on the altitude detector ?
Man up and tell the world what actually went wrong. You're just making things worse for when we do find out - and we will, in the end.
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