This shiny new Boeing spacecraft, the Starliner, went up to the ISS in June. They were supposed to return on 14 June. It is now August. It’s beginning to look like the Starliner is too unreliable to make the return trip, and NASA is going to have to ask SpaceX to rescue the crew. This is another embarrassing failure for Boeing. On my recent trip to Seattle, I flew on a 737, but it was OK, it was one of the older models, built before the disastrous takeover by incompetent MBAs.
Maybe the astronauts should have prayed harder?
I’m sure the starliner will get back to earth. You will hear it land when you hear the deafening sound: ‘BOEING, BOEING’ as it hits the ground.
If it’s a Boeing, I ain’t going.
I was recently in Seattle visiting an old college chum who had recently retired as a Boeing engineer. For years he has been bad mouthing Boeing’s management for the bad decisions they were making. I believe he wisely dumped all he Boeing stock after retiring.
BTW, flying Alaska Airlines, I was aboard a 737 Max. Shiver.
The worse thing is that they are solidifying SpaceX’s reputation. I despise the guy, but I have to be honest, this space contractor business is rock solid, even if they tend to provide spectacular fireworks in the development phase.
Musk’s company received $2.6B compared to Boeing $4.2B and, despite blowing up one of the test vehicles (during a static test on the ground, not in space) Crew Dragon was operational 4 years ago and is making money.
In the meantime, Boeing, despite having got more money from NASA is in the red for $1.5B, and had not been able to complete this validating flight, meaning their plan to be operational for next year are dead, if NASA doesn’t simply cancel the contract altogether, which would be a mercy killing.
You have to wonder how much money they are wasting on military projects.
The photo is awesome, though stranding astronauts on the ISS is gross incompetence. Boeing isn’t different from any other huge corporation, maximizing profits for the few above any other consideration like running a sustainable business or producing high quality products and services.
Why do you think the Project 2025 manifesto calls for defunding various government agencies, or purging the employees who run them and replacing them with various appointed toadies hand-picked by morally bankrupt tech-bros and reprehensible venture capitalists.
@Tethys #5
It is a good photo. I don’t think I’ve seen this angle before. It looks like the Nile has a big nose. : )
Actually SpaceX received something like $15 billion in US Federal funding as grants and contracts. They are largely a creation of NASA and US government funding. They also use US government facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg for launching their rockets.
And, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Elon Musk promptly went over to the Russian side. Our current enemy.
I know there is a lot of questions in the US military about how we ended up depending on a guy like…Elon Musk.
Yeah, when I heard this space capsule was made by Boeing, my heart sank.
I wouldn’t now go up in a spacecraft made by Boeing. Nothing personal but I’ve got cats to feed.
I do remember though when Boeing did have a good reputation and could produce state of the art aircraft.
We are still flying B-52 bombers.
They still make our ICBM missiles, the Minuteman.
When I was a kid growing up in northern Washington in the Dark Ages, Boeing was also the largest employer in the area.
Of course Musk and company will blame Boeing’s failures on DEI and HBCUs instead of capitalism. It goes without saying that I hope the crew makes it home safely but I wouldn’t mind seeing SpaceX fail at some point.
Though with their exploding rockets being considered “successes” who knows if the failure will even hurt them.
In full disclosure on the Discord I had said this when this issue started:
I still stand by that.
Photo does not awe me.
What one would expect, by now.
And the tech looks super-primitive.
(Defs not Star Trek quality)
@7
That’s a bad faith argument and you know it. You cannot compare the money company A received for 1 project with the money company B received for all of them for ten years, even if company B’s principal shareholder is a dangerous megalomaniac.
SpaceX, Northtrop, Boeing are all funded by government contracts, on astronomical scale, like are every space contractors in every countries.
The tragedy is that the old guard contractors have proven they are complete garbage, and that the alternative is controlled by tech billionaires A-Holes that have hired the smart people and are using smarter methods to undercut the competition.
No it isn’t.
While that $15 billion wasn’t all directly applied to the SpaceX capsule, there is a huge amount of synergy and overlap between all the various SpaceX projects. In terms of both human resources, engineering knowledge, and manufacturing infrastructure.
BTW, you don’t get to tell me what I know or don’t know.
That was out of line and you don’t know that. But you should and you do now.
@11 John Morales — My first thought was proof-of-concept Gemini capsule, circa 1964 or so.
Eyeballing it, it looks like the viewpoint is a hundred plus kilometers above central Tunisia or perhaps northwestern Libya, maybe even pretty much overhead of Tripoli or Misratah, looking down and southeast. Turn that thing 160 or so degrees to the left while keeping the downward part of the angle and maybe they could see the fireworks Etna’s currently putting on from there, on the northern horizon or so.
Such a disaster for what used to be one of America’s industrial jewels. It seems to be following the same path as a number of other companies who were bought by parties who were looking to maximize the returns of investments by cutting corners to the point were safety is severely compromised and dismissing old employees who knew what it took to build the planes.
@ 15 Bekenstein Bound
Um… yeah, dude. That’s unmistakably the Nile delta, only one of the most famous geographical landmarks on the face of the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_Delta#/media/File:Nile_River_and_delta_from_orbit.jpg
@ 11, 14
What exactly were you guys expecting? Anti-matter drive nacelles? X-D
@18 — I wasn’t expecting anything.
Yeah, the Starliner project has been delayed for years and plagued by lots of technical problems and cost overruns. It has cost NASA several billion dollars to get a spacecraft that doesn’t work. SpaceX by contrast delivered a spacecraft that works well four years ago for a lot less money.
Musk is a horrible person but SpaceX has accomplished some impressive things, imho. It’s the one company Musk is involved with that really has pushed the technological envelope beyond what anyone else is doing.
Here’s a handy image:
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E22AQGQBw7F284BKA/feedshare-shrink_800/0/1715716395722?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=nZrnqpvAGZq0GAbp9hMRFIdV6647ZldzA5Xd7guyuCA
Gemini is top row third from the left, Apollo 5th, and Starliner bottom row second from left. It’s much more like a souped up Apollo than a Gemini.
@20 springa73 — Besides everyone genuflecting whenever he walks into the room, I wonder how much involvement he really has. Some of the folks around here seem to think he’s their top engineer or something.
This makes me a wonder, again, how much of Musk’s success is based on other’s failures.
Boeing has been crippled by a dysfunctional management culture, NASA has been politically mismanaged for decades, so creating a niche for someone new who just needed to be less bad.
Same with the electric cars. You should think with their experienced engineers, production plants and dealer networks the established car manufacturers were in a much better position to place electric cars on the market – but their managers were content with making as much money as possible from their established vehicle types and lobby politicians to prevent any laws that would have impacted their business.
@Raven:
How much synergy is there between various Boeing projects? The point isn’t that you can’t ever say that projects are related or pool money to give a good idea of the overall resources available.
The point is that you’re pooling money for one company but not for the other. In order for this to be a good-faith argument, you’d have to come up with a good measure of what moneys are related and what moneys are not, then include only the related moneys for each company.
You’ve made no such effort here, declaring 100% of moneys “related” for SpaceX and 0% of moneys “related” for Boeing. That’s just not on.
I loathe Elon Musk, but you can’t bad mouth spaceX as a creation of NASA & the military while giving a free pass to Boeing, which is also clearly a creation of NASA & the military.
No matter what measure you use, Space X has been successful in capsule development and Boeing is … on the verge of adequate, but after losing $1.6B.
If they get this thing home intact and the program manages to continue, receive certification, and deliver a couple of missions to the space station under contract, then they’ll get some kind of D grade. Could be as high as a D+ depending on how things go from here, but there’s no way that they get a C after being this over budget, this far behind schedule, and this marginal on whether the capsule is even up for the job.
Meanwhile Musk remains a horrible human being, as bad or worse than the Boeing management at the human thing, but the SpaceX company couldn’t get worse than a C on their performance. People who know something about rocket development will be required to say where they fall on the C to A+ range. I am not that person. But they clearly received a passing grade on the order of “meets expectations”. While Boeing, at this point, isn’t even guaranteed a “needs improvement” mark. It’s entirely possible — it doesn’t look like it to me with my inexpert eye, but it IS entirely possible — that the program will die without ever launching a single commercial mission.
Whether you rate it F+ at that point or F- won’t really matter.
This is, indeed, a good question.
Oh, if only! The problems are because they were competent MBAs who took lessons from Jack Welch.
Incompetent MBAs would not have been able to do this.
@21. Silentbob : Cheers for that! Very nice comparison image there.
It would be a real shame if the USA had to rely on Space X only and there were no alternatives to it & Musks’apparent (near*) monopoly so far here So I was really hoping the Starliner would work a lot better than it has. Of course, it’s slightly better than relying only on the Russians as we were for a time after the Space Shuttle retired I really wish Obama hadn’t cancelled the Constellation program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program) especially given it had finally just flown its first successful test flight. I wish that there’d been work on an improved successor tthe Space Shuttles starting and continuing pretty much after their first successful flights – a Shuttle mark II and version III and so on.. Bit late now of course. But the more space craft and the more agencies flying them esp American ones for NASA the better.
Boeing as whole now of course, has its current terrible and worsening reputation and a strong need to change for the better and improve all round in so many ways.
.* At least in terms of corporations if not at the level of national govts – see again the link at #21 above.
Oh look, the earth IS flat.
Moi aussi.
I’m not as fully with you there. While I, too, wish we weren’t dependent on a company owned & ruled by Elon Musk, there’s no debating that they’re getting the job done for less money. Cheaper missions means more science for the same $$. The Constellation program looked like it was going to spend way too much money on something that was only a marginal evolution of past capabilities in every respect except total payload on the AresV (that was a huge boost there).
The Augustine Committee basically said that we couldn’t afford it. I’m not an expert, so I’ll defer to them.
Well, a return in a SpaceX capsule is probably healthier for the crew than having to depend on “thoughts and prayers”.
Years of cost-cutting in order to boost profits. Service very much a second order issue.