Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed (opens in new tab)

The chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two companies, exact same issues - go figure). But SpaceX is ideologically motivated and minimizing the costs of spaceflight, as they have now been doing for decades, is a fundamental part of their goal. To use an obvious example, we didn't build out two identical Apollo programs.

Space is orders of magnitude more complex than air flight, and Boeing is now left struggling even with the latter. China has a highly advanced space program and have successfully launched/manned their own space station, and much more. Yet even they are technologically far behind SpaceX - the same is true of Russia. I don't actually understand why this is, as it's not like SpaceX is relying on any sort of just extremely well guarded secrets, but whatever the reason, it is what it is. And so with this context, I don't think there's any realistic chance of Boeing "getting its act together" anytime in the foreseeable future. So it turns these gestures into little more than lighting tens of billions of dollars on fire. And that's a pretty big fire.

>But, from a policy making standpoint, you always need to diversify at the expense of upfront money because the downsides risks are too high if you put all your eggs in one basket.

Funny how it used to be SpaceX making this argument, and ULA was fighting tooth-and-nail for "sole source" as cheaper. :-\

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbL7o_SJsA

I don't see SpaceX pushing to discontinue ULA's contract, so it would seem they're at least treating ULA better than ULA treated them.

Competition is good, I agree.

The diversity argument does ring slightly hollow when iirc Boeing has only made two Starliners and it only has enough rockets for the 6 missions in the contract.

Basically they're set up to have one capsule in refurb while the other is at the station, and once the 6 Atlas V's are spent, someone has to cough up the money to do the stack of paperwork for crew rating the combo of Starliner and Vulcan.

Without SpaceX DoD would locked into a single maker, but also into a Russian made engine. 5 years behind the schedule and only after congress mandated it n

Hedging against what? Boeing should be allocated to making weapons now

Are you saying SpaceX is benefiting from NASA's diversity initiative?

> Glad this is happening

Will you stand by that statement when two astronauts die this weekend?

Weather scrubs are common, and not relevant to the success of a program.

GSE (Ground Servicing Equipment) are fairly common and fairly benign.

Valves on the rocket? Much, much more rare, and usually indicate some form of issue.

As an occasional launch livestream watcher since F9 still had rectangular engine mount, I'd say the real probability of a launch is about 25% for ANY vehicle except for Soyuz from Baikonur and Falcon 9. Everything else could scrub with 24h+ delays at easily 75% chance.

Could be wayward boats and planes, Hydrogen leaks, onboard self diagnostic failure, false hydrogen leak alarms, unstable wireless telemetry connection, upper atmospheric winds and all kinds of weather, frozen plumbings, computers passing out, automatic cutoff due to anomalous vibration at T-1s, anything.

With Soyuz scrubs and failure probabilities finally creeping up, the only vehicle in the world that likely lift off on first try is Falcon 9. Anything else could pause at T-45s and recycle from T-2 hours for couple times, then go all the way to T-0s, and then delay by a week. That's just how most of these things work.

Anybody remember "scrubtober" in 2020?

a troubled first few days of October, nicknamed “Scrubtober”, in light of scrubbed launch attempts which have affected SpaceX, Northrop Grumman Corp. and United Launch Alliance (ULA).

https://www.americaspace.com/2020/10/06/spacex-ends-scrubtob...

> If it takes multiple scrubs with months of delays before it finally launches

For anyone who doesn't follow rocket launches, this comment perfectly describes Boeing's Starliner program. Every. Single. Time. it tries to launch there is a non-weather related scrub. Valve issues have been a consistent issue for the capsule, and now it's the booster.

Did you read the article? It wasn’t a weather scrub. It was a faulty valve that ULA usually fixes by doing the hardware equivalent of turning it off and turning it back on again.

The Starliner stack is way less stupid than SLS.

It's less than 2x the price of SpaceX, whereas the SLS vs Falcon Heavy cost ratio is like 20x.

At least this time it wasn't scrubbed for a Starliner issue. The capsule isn't responsible for the booster's valve issues. I'm guessing the Boeing reps in capcom were wiping their brows

I think it's clear that Boeing, ULA, and all of the "old guard" space companies are still trying to catch up to the disruption from SpaceX and the ensuing boom of innovation that followed it. Let's face it - Starliner would not have even been thought of without SpaceX bringing competition. They were caught flat footed and had to scramble to catch up. Now we see the results of that - a capsule that's only partly baked.

Note that SpaceX has since flown eight more crewed missions to the ISS (one is up there now), as well as four other crewed missions to orbit (not for NASA.)

Ars Technica just had an article about this the other day.

For context: SpaceX had a “head start” because they had an existing cargo capsule they modified while Boeing was designing from scratch.

Still you can add this to the pile of stuff Boeing is going through lately and it doesn’t look good at all. One more thing that’s not working out right.

> There's really only one space company in the US today

Rocket Lab ([1]) is very decent and has a rapid launch cadence ([2]), even though their rockets are smaller than Falcon 9 (for now). They launched 8 rockets in 2023, 5 rockets in 2024 so far and plan to launch another 15 rockets this year.

1. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electron_launches

SpaceX may be by far the most prominent of the new space companies, but many smaller companies, especially Rocketlab are also punching above their weight relative to the old guard.

The issue was that all the incentives for Boeing were to stagnate. The government would happily sign blank checks to them as long as they kept saying "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand". It took SpaceX coming around and showing results to prove that while space is hard, it isn't as difficult and slow as old space would have liked us to continue believing.

> There's really only one space company in the US today

This is just categorically false. There are many space companies. Launch isn't the only thing that happening in space.

But yes, SpaceX in terms of launch and operational sats dwarfs everybody to a degree that is unprecedented.

But there is a lot of money flowing in and many former SpaceXers have created lots of companies. Rocket companies, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, ABL. Lunar companies like Astrobotics. Transport companies like Impulse Space.

I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment. Yes Space-X has had the most launches and gets the most press, but the US has a very healthy launch industry.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/top-us-launch-compan...

I'd rather hate Elon Musk on Mars than love Boeing on Earth.

SpaceX was able to accomplish it because they were actually trying. They quickly became the company to go to if you entered aerospace primarily to work yourself hard doing R&D, so they got all the best young aerospace engineers who just wanted to get things done rather than have their soul crushed by the bureacracy at the old space giants.

Meanwhile Boeing and the other old guard were full of jaded "it isn't that easy" types. It's difficult to innovate when your instinctual response to attempts at innovation is to look for excuses on how it won't be that straightforward, that it won't be economical, or that it won't make sense.

Eg, if we look at Falcon 9, first the arguments from old space companies were that launching to orbit is too difficult for an inexperienced company to do reliably ("they don't have spaceflight heritage"), then that they must be cutting corners to bring prices that low, then in the early days of F9 booster reuse, the argument shifted to saying that there wasn't enough stuff to launch to justify the expense (there was the ULA CEO's argument that, for them it'd take 10 flights per booster to break even or ArianeSpace's saying that they'd have to shut down the factories and lose expertise becuase they'd only need a handful of reusable boosters to fully meet demand).

In a way, SpaceX's success is just an engineering version of Planck's principle (https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Planck%27s_principle?&useskin...)

> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?

Two factors, IMHO. First and biggest one is by being a private company operating on its own budget authority. Basically, SpaceX was free to work in whatever way they wanted - a 180° turn from "established" practice both at NASA and ESA and the political decision makers that the billions of dollars of expenses had to be distributed across the continent fairly to help politicians get reelected. That means instead of dealing with shit tons of suppliers, wasting insane amounts of money on tenders, specification documents and whatnot, SpaceX went in-house for as much as they could, in very very few locations on top of that to save on shipping.

The second one is ossification. Boeing, Airbus, EADS, the major carmakers - they all got big by perfecting (sometimes centuries) old designs by iteration: airframes, cars, combustion engines, rockets, you name it. Straying from the beaten path comes with very high internal risk for anyone involved, and so very little true innovation happens. SpaceX in contrast operated on a green field - a ton of money and a general attitude of "you're free to do whatever the fuck you want, and failures are expected along the path".

Eventually, no doubt there, SpaceX and Tesla will both ossify as well, it's a trap for any large organization - and we're seeing signs with Tesla already, with attention going to the Cybertruck instead of getting the issues with existing models (e.g. fabrication tolerances, spare part availability) under control first.

It's easy for old, incumbent companies to become ossified, where their internal culture and bureaucracy and processes are hilariously inefficient. At any given time, there will be some people pushing back on that, but there will always be more people there who are okay with it -- because the ones who couldn't handle the ossification left, while the people who were okay with it stayed. Survivorship bias, in other words; sometimes this is called the Dead Sea effect: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-... (this article talks about it in terms of IT competence, but you can easily apply it to other aspects of a business' culture)

That's why it's so important for it to be easy for new entrants to start up in an economic sector. You need them to pressure the old guard, or failing that, to replace them.

> with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

Boeing were reverse-acquired by Douglas Aircraft (after they'd reverse-acquired McDonnell) and their terrible quarterly-numbers management has destroyed a lot of Boeing's engineering. But the stock price kept going up which is the important thing, right?

Look at a company after about 30 years and basically everybody that was there before, is gone. You keep the same name, the same brand, but all the people are entirely different. And people are, by far, the most important factor in the capabilities of a company. And often times people just aren't really replaceable. But you have to replace them, nonetheless, and so you just end up with something entirely different, even if it has the same name.

An even better example than Boeing is the Apollo program. The degree of competence, efficiency, and speed of that program all under NASA - is completely unlike anything we've ever seen anytime before, or since. JFK gave his 'to the Moon' speech in late 1962, when our grand achievement in space had been nothing beyond on briefly sending a man to orbit just a few months earlier. Less than 7 years later (!!), the first man would set foot on the Moon. The entire Apollo program cost $179 billion over 11 years (inflation adjusted), for a total of $16 billion per year. Their latest annual budget was $25 billion.

Boeing is a grossly inefficient organization, have been for a while. It's not just them, this is typical of the defense contractor side of the house for companies like them. It doesn't help that they're getting the high publicity contracts, lots of low publicity contracts that go about as well and are run about as poorly.

> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?

I have no particular insight into this subject, but an Ars article [1] from yesterday offers some speculation:

'"The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding," said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program [...]'

and

'SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing's space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company's problem—they were NASA's. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price. Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment.'

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...

> Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

Definitely part of the reason. They did poach a lot of good people.

SpaceX vs Gov Contractors been the war cry of those who believe Private >> Contractors. Everything Elon has done for SpaceX has been absolutely relentless, and razor focused on the goal. This includes being willing to sacrifice individual's life-balance for the mission. Combine all that with a willingness to do fast iteration and break things where it's "safe" to do so. You've got the ability to disrupt an industry/ecosystem that's gotten lazy and fat over time.

To be clear, Private >> Contractors is not 100% nor is the flip. There are too many examples of both directions either working or not working.

>> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time

Because they already had Dragon sending cargo to the ISS at the start of the commercial crew program. They used the money to upgrade and get man rated. Boeing started their capsule from scratch. This still doesn't explain all of it, but nobody else has mentioned their head start.

Likely sunk cost fallacy. Space flight is still new enough that starting from scratch lets you use all the lessons that were learned from your predecessors while not getting stuck in the muck of institutional inertia. And you still aren't that far behind the more experienced competition. Unlike say, a commodity like candles that doesn't have anything new to discover, and the existing manufactures cannot be out innovated.

I know a lot of people here hate Musk but he's actually pretty good at the rocket stuff. If you see him going around being interviewed on Everyday Astronaut he knows the design and trade offs of every part. I doubt you'd see that with Boeing management. It's a bit of a shame he's shifted to ranting on Twitter/X.

> Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

No

For one, SpaceX can't even hire non-citizens from what I understand

But yeah they probably poached some ULA, some LM, also from some other companies.

"Why valves are a spacecraft engineer’s worst nightmare" is a great read about all the problems of valves[0]. There's also an interesting interview of the author worth a listen[1].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/why-valves-are-a-spacecraf...

[1] https://offnom.com/episodes/149

They should talk to Steam. Their Valve seems to be doing okay. /s

There is nothing sensationalist. The flight was scrubbed. The headline didn't make any mention of the reason, the fact is literally, the flight attempt was a scrub.