Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps The return of Crew-9 from the International Space Station (ISS) in a Crew Dragon has raised the question of what the future holds for Boeing's Calamity Capsule, also known as the CST-100 Starliner. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore had journeyed to the ISS on board the Boeing Starliner as part of the vehicle's first crewed test …
"Someone _IS_ still there to watch? Right?"
Pretty sure no-one has been there to watch so far. But you need to remember that this isn't a fault in the system, this is how it is supposed to work! Keep the govt money feeding Boeing, some of it will come back your way as some campaign donations and the rest ensures you have a nice job waiting when you retire from govt.
"Starliner is not a costs plus contract so it costs you, the American tax payer, nothing extra."
Yes and no, while tax payer won't need to pay for development and launch costs there will be costs to NASA for people to manage the flight, time on ISS, loss of docking port, having to shift other missions around, etc
TBH, have a second capsule and launch option is not a bad thing, F9 while reliable has had niggly problems and same with Crew Dragon and while they should be good for next 5 years or so, who knows.
At this point I think Boeing are only there as the token "competition" as the capitalists believe that competition is good.
That does mean that they're now in the role that SpaceX had when this all started.
I hope they keep pushing as we wouldn't want SpaceX to get too comfortable, but if I were a Boeing shareholder I'd have some serious concerns.
It appears that few have any inkling of what import duties do. It is economics 101. Import duties protect the local production against dumping from foreign factories. Canada, Europe and China all have import duties in various forms. Europe has sky high import duties in the form of VAT. All Donny did is call them on it and imposing reciprocal tariffs. Of course the owners of foreign factories do not like that and they are using the press to blow against it. The more sensible ones are starting to build or expand factories in the US, which is exactly what Donny wants, since it will result in more US jobs.
Dear God in Heaven,please stop parroting things that are posted on the 'interWebs' when you do not understand them !!!
Please do read 'Economics 101' ... read it and ingest the meaning.
Any person who had even the most basic understanding of Economics would NOT have said what you said !!!
VAT is not an import duty, it is a tax that everyone pays on ALL applicable goods ... even the goods that are produced in the country itself. !!!
Tariffs are paid by the people who BUY certain goods produced outside the country i.e. America.
The country producing the goods DOES NOT pay the tax ... YOU DO !!!
Works well IF you have the same goods available produced in America BUT IF NOT you pay the premium or do without !!!
Tariffs when used are a game of 'Tit for Tat' ... very difficult to win unless ALL goods you will need are produced in America.
Until you have re-balanced all your production to be inside America your citizens WILL be paying more for their goods ... period.
The question of whether the goods in the future are of equal quality is left as a problem for the reader.
Hint:
American manufacturers have a track record of going for the cheapest route, to maximise profits.
That is why so much production moved to China and similar places ... because they are cheaper to employ & work harder !!!
(Employment laws are minimal and totally in favour of the Employer NOT Employee !!!)
New American factories are not economic UNLESS you force external sources to be dearer ... this still does not ensure that the quality will be the same or better !!!
Profits at all costs will be the order of the day and short-cuts WILL be made ... as of old !!!
People on low wages will feel the pain !!!
People who are well off will not notice as they can afford to buy what they always bought.
Guess which group Trumpf & his friends belong to ???
:)
If Boeing were to adopt the "move fast and break things" approach, rather than the "drag things out and get that 'cost overrun' revenue" approach, they might be flying astronauts on a regular basis.
I suspect Boing, being a large and old company, has the typical problems + attitudes of a large + old company.
SpaceX is STILL a YOUNG company, with fresh ideas and no need for bureaucracy, internal OR external.
Something to think about...
SpaceX is in a unique situation with Starlink.
Starlink is paying for all that broken stuff. If a Starlink launch succeeds, they have more revenue-generating satellites in orbit. If it doesn't, they "got more where that came from" and it's a reason to keep launching & trying.
Every Boeing launch comes directly out of the bottom line.
Starship is in the same situation, but it's got a much bigger possible payoff if it succeeds than mere taxi service to ISS, so every semi-failed Starship launch is an investment.
Edit: however, they're finding out that successful re-entry is hard. NASA/Boeing already knew that, so they didn't want to risk astronauts last time.
>SpaceX is in a unique situation with Starlink.
It is interesting that the only way that a move fast and break things, hyper-dynamic Silicon Valley focussed company can actually be viable is to be a vertical manufacture where you are your own best customer.
It's as if Amazon decided to build its own airfreighters and electric delivery trucks
What I understand, as an outsider, is that Boeing was doing great until they "acquired" McDonnell-Douglas, and then everything went into the shitter. That said, I'm forced to agree with you that SpaceX seems more able to take risks and innovate than Boeing.
Yes. Boeing was doing great when the leadership were all qualified engineers. Mc Donnel Doughlas was run by a bunch of idiotic project managers and accountants. They did a reverse-takeover of Boeing (the tail wagging the dog) and then set out to destroy a once great company. Starliner is a fantastic concept that was pissed on by cheap-shit, dumb-as-shit accountants and 'leadership team' fuckwits.
No, Boeing was regarded as the "sure thing" and nobody knew why NASA was wasting money on those SpaceX people. There was no "slightly" about it.
Speaking of SpaceX, tomorrow is 3/21 blastoff day in Titusville.
Last time, SpaceX brought out a flown Dragon capsule.
Boeing could bring out a flown Starliner capsule but I guess they don't want to clean all the rotten fruit off afterwards.
True. They played they "Well we built Saturn V so we know what we're doing."
And hoped that NASA (especially William Gerstenmaier)* wouldn't notice a) their grandparents built Saturn V, their last actual attempt to build a cutting edge aerospace vehicle was the DARPA XS-1 project, which they trousered the money for (after they swapped engine partners mid-stream) and then walked away from it. b)Most of their rocket expertise had been hived off into ULA as sole heavy lift supplier to the USG at eyewatering prices. Why they (or LM outside ULA) got any STS work remains a mystery to me.
And let's not forget the vigorous efforts by Senators like Shelby to push for a down select to a sole supplier ASAP. And by "Sole supplier" I do mean Boeing.
Effective competition got the US 2 new human rated launch systems and 2 new human rated capsules. Three if you count that Dream Chaser is still in the game.
It could be said that it also demonstrates the joint-stock corporation is a very poor vehicle for delivering innovation that's complex to build and has high actual (as opposed to perceived) risk. SX is still privately held and SNC is (OMG) employee owned.
Without effective competition (and in 2025 that means at a minimum partial reuse for TSTO) SX will continue to hoover up anything that that's small and cheap going to LEO to kill its competition and offer competitive (but not you'd-be-crazy-to-look-at-any-other-supplier) pricing for everything else.
*Thought he was J's partner in MiB
Boeings issues can be traced back to the merger but I think the more fundamental issue was as senior management and execs were replaced by Harvard MBA types who knew little about the industry technology and focused their efforts on the bottom line, shareholders and their own bonuses at the expense of all else. We have seen this time and time again when supposed corporate experts, who know everything there is to know about running a business, come in and destroy a company due to arrogance and self belief they are Godlike in their ability to pilot a company. But somewhere along the line they lose sight of the fundamental reason a manufacturing company, any manufacturing company exists, to make money by making something that customers want to buy at a price that is higher than the cost to make it.
Unfortunately so many of these people believe there is a framework, a method, a play book, that if you just follow it, trust in the system it will automatically generate profits and growth. So you have the Jack Welch school of thought, just keep firing the "bottom" 10% every year and hey presto, your employees become superstars.
Or you follow some case studies where a good percentage of companies that did this that or the other, reorganized management, introduced policies etc. and just like that were successful. So guess what, now your new shiny executive team follow that process because that's what worked before. It's Gartner on steroids.
It's not that these methods are bad or incorrect, but it's the application of them in the specific instance that is crucial. Boeing exists in a very unique environment, there are not many comparable to look at for reference, so you end up with rote unthinking application of methods that don't actually make a lot of sense and miss the fundamental statement of the company, make aerospace products that customers want to buy/use.
Back in the day when I was getting my Prince II certification the one thing our instructor beat into us was every project is different and the Prince II methodology should be applied appropriately and at the right level of verboseness that makes sense for the project you are working on. Pity these exec didn't get that memo.
back this comment.
Having suffered a "I'm a manager and I dont need to know what you make because I'm here to manage" type manager.
Give him due, he did start well in raising the prices of some basic stuff we were making at a loss. then we lost the customer completely, why? because we were making some high end and high profit stuff for him as well as the loss making crap. soon as the total price went up.. off he went. closely followed by a bunch of other aerospace customers who all had their prices raised.
he lasted 3&1/2 months before being fired , sadly 30 other people lost their jobs as costs were cut to save the company.
As for the infamous "sack the bottom 10%" way.... I hope its going to be done on the number of lines of code per programmer. just been dying to use
N=0
Add A,N
Add N, 1
Add A,N
Add N,1
etc etc etc upto N=3000
rather than a simple for-next loop
> Prince II methodology should be applied appropriately and at the right level of verboseness that makes sense for the project you are working on
100% true. Was dinned into us from the moment we opened the first page of the Introductory course. Also true of every project methodology. But the battle against the "approved ticksheet" mentality never ends.
It doesn't help that you have accreditation auditors who are just as dim as some of the managers talked about elsewhere in this thread who ask questions about why you've deviated from the frameworks or methodologies in use (whether that's agile, PRINCE II, ITIL etc) and will score you down or file a recommendation or otherwise ding you on their report if they don't like the answer, regardless of how good a reason you provide.
This then breeds into management the idea that they have to stick to the frameworks like glue lest they risk losing their accreditations or having to change policies later on to more closely adhere to them.
100% agree, I have lost count of the number of times I have had conversations with auditors who parrot the standard line and refuse to examine the case to see if the requirement meets the need.
Case in point.
Do you have a process to stop employees sharing confidential information to AI tools like ChatGPT
Yes, we have a policy that forbids employees using tools like ChatGPT if using confidential or proprietary information
How do you block the users from using ChatGPT
We don't, I didn't say we did, we have a policy that forbids them
But what is stopping them from using ChatGPT and copying information?
The threat of being fired if they are caught
But don't you block ChatGPT
No we don't and even if we did how do we block the multitude of other AI tools, redirects etc
Well surely you must make some effort at restricting use
We do. We have a policy that forbids it, all traffic is logged and we can at any time review those logs to observe if an employee is using an AI tool inappropriately.
But we have other clients who addressed this by blocking sites like ChatGPT.
Well good for them, has it been successful in blocking other sites, redirects etc.?
We didn't ask them
No you didn't
It makes sense to have redundancy, as a failure of Falcon/Dragon could lead to a long break in service (as happened to the Shuttle Program).
However, there is nothing to say that redundancy has to come from Boeing; I wouldn't be surprised if another commercial provider surfaces at some point (such as the Sierra Space Dream Chaser DC-200
Bean counters are nice to have BUT NOT to actually be in charge. They can have honest input as to the effects of bean decisions but first and foremost it is the creators that have the dream MUST lead the endeavor. Walter Boeing, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, And the hundreds of thousands more who never quit and give up THEIR dream.
Why has Boeing gone from THE Aerospace Company to a JOKE in many respects? Per 3M "Discovering the poor-quality mineral could have caused an early end to our fledgling company, but our founders persisted. Why? Because something more important was born that first year: the spirit of innovation and collaboration that forms the foundation of 3M today. So instead of calling it quits, we turned to different materials, applied them to other products, gained the trust of important investors and built up sales little by little." Bean counters would have called it quits before the losses got TOO big.
"Walter Boeing, Henry Ford, Elon Musk"
In the context of letting the creatives lead with their dreams. Then goes on to name industrialists, businessmen and product managers.
Yes, you need to be creative within your profession, but people do like to try to paint Musk as some kind of genius inventor/engineer.
Edison was a thief who stole the ideas of the scientists working under him and took all the credit for those inventions for himself. He was a good marketer and salesman which is why he's so famous today.
Carnegie, Morgan etc were all business tycoons in the 19th century US model, which basically meant "screw everyone possible to make a quick buck and to hell with the consequences". They were all nasty, brutish people who wasted the lives of their workers to make their personal fortunes. The only reason people think of Carnegie with any positivity now is that he gave away most of his money
just before he died. It doesn't mean he wasn't a complete and utter bastard trying to build that money up.
Not only was a bastard that makes the current crop of Billionaires like like choir boys,
Got his start insider trading with help from his mentor Scott.
Used labor exploitation in a fashion that would make Bezos weep with joy
Ruthlessly boke down any attempt to unionize
If you want to get a sense of how these guys lived their lives and how there is nothing new, have a read of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184483.Meet_You_in_Hell
I'm adamant Boeing will pull-out of the manned space business. There are so many other companies which can do it more cheaply and profitably than them and they've got their shareholders to look after.
All of this could've been avoided if Boeing hadn't managed the program according to its profitability wishes and instead focused on getting a working manned space capsule. All the delays and cost-cutting has cost them dearly. So dearly they'll probably conclude that this is not the business they want to be in.
While Boing has seriously borked a lot of their own operations lately (as already commented on above) the more serious issue here is the bigger picture.
NASA, for political reasons, always has worked with as many different contractors as was practical. They have always been forced to award expensive contracts to Big American Companies so as to ram home the politics-driven image of a government organization that spends the taxpayer's money to the benefit of American blue-collar workers. They have to, because Joe Sixpack couldn't care less about space exploration and the development of technology; look no further than how American citizens immediately lost all interest in the Apollo project after the first moonlanding had been accomplished and the US had beat the Ruskies.
So for Artemis the usual list of prime contractors was compiled: Aerojet Rocketdyne, Axiom Space, Bechtel, Blue Origin, Boeing, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX. Unfortunately there is only one contractor in that list who currently has his nose stuck into the presidential backside, who has stated that the moon is a distraction and we should go directly to Mars instead, and who is a member of the industrial billionaire's club that also includes the new director of NASA.*
With that one contractor and his bitter orange pretty much having taken over NASA, I think we can safely write off Artemis, at least for the foreseeable future.
* Note that I'm not seriously counting Blue Origin here - they primarily lead a consortium of more established contractors and, IMO, were included mostly as a token gesture. So far they have contributed little successful new technology to the project, and as for a New Glenn putting a Blue Moon HLS on the lunar surface this year... Well, we'll see.
