Starliner takes off ... back to the factory and not space Boeing's troubled CST-100 Starliner capsule, once expected to ferry astronauts to and from space, is heading back to the workshop after suffering mechanical failures. The spacecraft's second unmanned flight test was supposed to take place this month though that launch was delayed, and now scrapped, after 13 of the valves …
The problem seems to be down to leakage through seals which was expected meeting humid air in the void behind which wasn't. In space the void is vented to vacuum to get rid of the leakage, but on the ground is connected to the outisde atmosphere and NTO plus water creates nitric acid which has corroded the valves. Humid air in Florida, who could have forseen that?
In Liftoff, the book about the early days of SpaceX, they lose the 2nd or 3rd launch because of corrosion in the salt air of the little Pacific island they are working from - with no hanger.
Except they were new to this and Boeing have been launching from Alabama and Florida since the 1940s
> Boeing is the worlds biggest weapons maker and essentially owns the DoD - but there is no way they are going to anger the Disney Corporation
Last thing you want is the Disney Corporation going nuclear on your @$$.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/02/21/disney-world-could-have-gone-nuclear/
If it's Boeing it's not going - anywhere.
That said, pity for the engineers involved. The manglement likely cut their budget more than once to give themselves nice bonus payments (for the cost saving). And a race is always more interesting if it is two or more.
Ever since Boeing murdered hundreds of people by refusing to add safety equipment, so their planes plunged headfirst into the ground, they've been on a roll.
Hey at least THIS time they managed to get the pointy bit of the 1960s tech era rocket pointing towards the big blue space overhead!
Ahhh the good old 'excess of bean counters' claim.
My experience theres usually just enough bean counters and its usually the huge reams of hangers on that are the cause of the problem.
Hence having pre-meetings about the subject for today's meeting, and a post meeting debrief on how the meeting went with paper reports from everyone. all of which takes about 8 &1/2 hours leaving us 15 minutes to do any real work (and then having to write that up for the next day's meeting arrrgh)
Or to call out an example from my world recently(cue heavy NSFW cursing), I would like to talk to the product designer from the customer and to a tooling engineer from one of our suppliers.
However our manglement insists everything has to go through them.... which results in the wrong details passed to me, the wrong spec passed to the tooling engineer and the wrong tool arriving......
But its all my fault.
"The Boeing merger with Mcdonnell-Douglas seems to have led to an excess of bean-counters and a lack of engineers"
Indeed, and tl;dr version is that in the merged company, the bean counter McDonnell Douglas managers then effectively took control of Boeing, so diminishing Boeing's engineering safety culture, and they then moved the headquarters from Washington State to Chicago so diminishing communications and direct, personal managerial interactions with engineers. The rest is history.
Oh, bull. After the merger Condit, the Boeing CEO, was CEO of the combined companies.
It was McDonnell Douglas engineers that built the first space capsules, and fighters such as the F4 Phantom, the F15 Eagle and the F18.
But all Boeing's troubles are due to McDonnel Douglas "bean counters" from fourteen years ago, most of whom are probably long gone.
The blame for Boeing's problems with the 737 Max design and software, as well as their problems with the current hardware, software and testing primarily belongs to one group: their engineers, who seem more focused on deflecting blame than doing their jobs.
While a glacial pace was not that unusual since the 1970s, with countless delays and schedule revisions for everything from the Space Shuttle to anything else vaguely space-related, this is not that era any more, as SpaceX's upcoming crew missions to the ISS keeps rubbing in. Yes, that upstart company people were laughing at a decade ago.
Even as next month is likely to see the first orbital flight attempt by a SpaceX Starship, the rest of 'old Space' seem to be just standing around in bewilderment, trying to figure out whether they can get a crewed capsule to the ISS, or a first uncrewed SLS rocket into space before SpaceX does a crazy LEO-to-LTO mission before returning to Earth after scooping up a bit of Moon dust for funsies.
At this rate Boeing Space is quickly proving itself to be not only irrelevant and outdated, but (like Blue Origin) sooner harmful to progress than helpful, what with lobbying US Congress to keep the sweet, sweet pork flowing.
To paraphrase a song from the lamentably late Tom Petty:
"The La-an-ding is the hardest part"
Plus you must have missed the last one. To be fair the next one, from orbit, is going to be much harder.
It doesn't even have a drone ship to land on just to make it a bit easier.
You do realise that the Starship landing 'KA-BOOMS!' are all part of the prototyping process, i.e. they are learning to get the new system working right 'every time'. Amazingly that doesn't happen by magic, even when his muskiness says, "Make it so."
They are, indeed, 'making it so' - as Elon knows full well.
Boeing's core of engineers that delivered the 747-787 have been eroded - especially by the McDonnell Douglas lot. Decisions and design clearly aren't integrated any more, stupid stuff like the 787 battery fires, or Starliners lack of synchronised clocks are more than ample evidence of this. Don't get any of us started on the farce that is the 737Max.
Too many managers, not enough responsibility for design integration. Leads to cost overruns, bloat and unreliability.
Very successful business for printing money, but if I were an airline boss - or in military procurenent - I'd be looking elsewhere.
>Very successful business for printing money, but if I were an airline boss - or in military procurenent - I'd be looking elsewhere.
Where ?
They successfully shut down Bombardier's C series.
If you are an airline you can't buy Airbus without risking whose next in the Whitehouse
If you are military what's your alternative МиГ ?
Bombardier courted Boeing, to be taken over.
Boeing made a huge mistake in not taking Bombardiers C-Series, because the C-Series was a great product to slot in to the Boeing series.
Unfortunately , it would also decimate the 737 market, since the 737 should have been put out to pasture 10 years ago, and I wonder if Boeing was still smarting from the MD takeover lessons learned.
As a result, Airbus stepped in - said thanks - and rebranded it the 220.
Airbus were not concerned about it decimating the A320 family, different mission profiles really.
Now, Boeing did have a purchase going on of Embraer, which they pulled out of in 2020, which is where your confusion lies.
Embraer spent a fortune reorganising to separate out the Military arm from Commercial. They are/were taking Boeing to arbitration as Boeing had penalties for pulling out...
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i wonder if Boeing is paying for all this drama or does their contract have a way for Uncle Sam to fund it. The hallmark of old aerospace is that you do nothing unless paid for it and reap the 15% profit on anything spent, also known as 'cost plus'. The finance people abound with these kind of contracts.
SpaceX has invested in its own future and is focused on innovation, and it shows.
Nope. Boeing are paying. The joke is that both SpaceX and Boeing bid for the contract to ship to the ISS and SpaceX asked for less money than Boeing - and so in gratitude NASA have paid them less.
However NASA paid some development cash and then pay per mission. But there's only budget for one test mission, and so Boeing have been made to do this one again, at their own cost.
Did a brief search. NASA's budget estimate is that SpaceX are costing them $55m per astronaut to ISS, while Beoing are $90m each. Which is about what they paid for the last Soyuz flight. linkylinkylinky
I'd thought that there was development money, and then you got paid for a guaranteed number of flights under COTS. And I've read in several places that Boeing are paying for this second test flight. But it appears it's more complex than that and so Boeing have already had much of their cash up-front. Though I don't know if NASA can claw this back, if Boeing continue to balls things up - or if we'll still be reading about the 15th Boeing Starliner test in ten years time - while SpaceX are on their 4th contract to do multiple astronaut shuttle flights for NASA...
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