Yes, Elon is right, SpaceX did it cheaper, faster everything that you'd dream of. 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.
That said - I do wish Boeing+ULA would get it's act together. Because nearly 80%+ cost to the tax payer for hedging is quite expensive. US Gov definitely enables this.
I've said contradicting statements. My conclusion is, this is overall net positive even if pricy.
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.
And there is no real secret to a lot of their manufacturing methods either. They just attacked hard problems aggressively with really smart people and clear leadership.
Other companies, like Toyota, have intermittently focused mostly on engineering/design/cost, but they went back to their old habits after gaining market dominance instead of using their position to push the market forward in some other way.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
Second, redundancy is good, although I wish the other provider was not Boeing. even Dragon at one point exploded, and at that time starliner and dragon had very different perceived trajectories. Of course, with Eric Berger's new article on ars technica on Boeing, it's a wonder Starliner even exists.
The reason NASA's failures were such a huge deal is because they shouldn't have happened. In both cases you had issues with the managerial layer ignoring the engineering layer, and moving ahead in high risk scenarios - that was particularly stupid in Challenger, where they also had a high profile civilian aboard. In SpaceX the managerial layer and the technical layer are largely the same thing, and they also have a system where any flight engineer can independently cancel a flight, for any reason, at his own discretion. So the chances of a flight moving forward with a predictable risk is quite low. So what will most likely happen when they lose a crewed flight is an investigation to ensure it was not caused by systemic errors, some effort to ensure that whatever did happen does not happen again, and then a return to flight.
It's good management.
Boeing is not incentivized, nor has it been for a long, to do a good job.
Look at the 60s - there's tremendous excitement about space, astronauts are heroes, everyone is putting in 10x effort to get over the finish line.
What Boeing is being asked to do now is replicate this every few years, except all the attention, all the excitement, all the growth is gone. They have to recreate the miracle, but nobody cares!
SpaceX comes in and says - we have a new heroic mission. Do the same thing, but make it repeatable and efficient and stupid easy.
The “secret” to reliable components which can be produced at scale is very much not generally out there.
Can’t really scale that. And good luck doing corporate espionage outside of physically kidnapping them.
Financially, there is almost zero chance for SpaceX to go under at the point they're at - every launch is profitable for them and the margin goes up with each time they can re-use any component, for boosters their record holder was at 19 launches until it was taken out by bad weather during transport [1].
The real danger for SpaceX is Elon Musk, plain and simple. Either he does something really stupid, something even more dumb than playing personal CSR for neo-Nazis, and the US government says "okay, that's f...ing enough now" as a result, or he goes completely against the US government: push for Mars because he finds out he has some sort of cancer or whatnot and wants to die there while the US government wants to first focus on the moon, or turn off services to Ukraine and instead provide services to Russia... or sell critical information to Russia, China or whatever just to stick the finger to the US government (aka, follow the Trumpian way of "I do what I want, what do they wanna do lol").
Yes, the US government can always go and nationalize SpaceX if need be, so it's not too high of a risk for SpaceX to go completely belly-up, but it would mean years upon years of nasty judicial fights.
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/falcon-9-spacexs-...
But what has changed is that the government has grown absolutely massive. This growth has created a dependency relationship from many major companies, as falling out of favor with an oft retaliatory government could be ruinous to their margins. Vice versa, the government is not only excessively generous with companies that play ball, but also often turns a blind eye to their offenses. This has driven a culture of widespread self censorship and feigned never-ending approval.
If anything I think Elon voicing his genuine opinions on matters, right or wrong, is one of the most patriotic things he could be doing, because loyalty to a country does not mean loyalty to a government - and often it's the exact opposite. Even in military oaths, for instance, this reality is observed. Officers swear oaths of loyalty not to the government, the President, or even their chain of command, but to the US Constitution. [1] There's endless great quotes from the Founding Fathers on this topic. A few random ones:
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- "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison
- "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." - Thomas Jefferson
- "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams
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I think the world, and especially our democracy, would work vastly better if everybody just spoke honestly. Right or wrong, smart or stupid. People freely and openly expressing themselves is the only way a democracy can really function. There is a reason that the 1st Amendment is at the top of the Bill of Rights. And right now we live in a time where this is probably more true than ever. Opposing never-ending wars, rapidly trending towards WW3, and the grossly out of touch and seemingly delusional politicians driving us there, does not demonstrate disloyalty. If anything, the path we're currently on could very well lead to ruin, yet so few are willing to observe that the Emperor has no clothes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...
Not true! The challenges are different but space is in a sense simpler since the reliability requirements for space are not as stringent.
[1] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/05/04/how-boeing-was-res...
[2] - https://archive.is/eO3FJ (WaPo archive)
But yes as long as he keeps actually skilled and stable people managing his stuff it should be fine, more than fine.
Eventually though those subsidies will need to wind down but there’s too few competitors at this point.
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.
But is ULA any sort of threat to SpaceX? If I were Musk, I'd want them sticking around just to make me look good.
There's every reason to believe that this is also exactly what they genuinely believed - that SpaceX was just going to be a failed gimmick. They made 0 efforts to try to ensure they stayed technologically ahead of SpaceX, in spite of having many orders of magnitude greater resources and manpower available to themselves. They simply watched, mocked, and became obsolete.
In any case ULA's not going anywhere. Boeing and Lockheed are both major arms dealers that the US government depends on to keep the bombs flying.
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.
Or/and Falcon 9!
Starliner is designed for compatiblity with . . . Falcon 9, and Vulcan Centaur.
IIRC ULA did have a license to manufacture their own domestic RD-180s (or was considering getting it), but the factory for those would've been very expensive and not worth it with Vulcan in its early design stages.
Also, their commercial airliner side used to be a "balancer" and a backup, they never were tied to the "next big gun thing" like maybe Raytheon or Lockheed are. Funny as it sounds ... Boeing's current struggles can't be blamed on them being overly cosy with government, or overly wasteful thanks to the Pentagon's deep pockets.
Not sure though that more defense money/contracts would help. "solve" what is reported about their inner culture.
would you elaborate ?
Will you stand by that statement when two astronauts die this weekend?
If it takes multiple scrubs with months of delays before it finally launches, then it'll be another thing to add on to Starliner's list of difficulties fulfilling their contract with NASA. However a scrub or two is business as usual.
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.
And to be fair to the starcrossed Starliner, the valve "pressure regulation valve on the liquid oxygen tank of the Atlas 54 rocket‘s Centaur upper stage."
https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/05/07/starliner-launch-scrub...
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.
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...
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.
Starliner is meant to be reusable, except its components can’t even make it through one run uneventfully [1]. It’s mated to the Atlas V, a buggy, disposable stack that’s already been EOL’d [2].
NASA’s money would be so much better spent—even now!—on literally anything else. The amount of practical redundancy provided by Starliner is zero.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test_2
It's less than 2x the price of SpaceX, whereas the SLS vs Falcon Heavy cost ratio is like 20x.
Starliner is directly comparable to Dragon. SLS can technically do things Falcon Heavy can't (e.g. more payload).
But Boeing is responsible for putting it on an Atlas V. Why?! There are fewer than thirty of them left! Why aren’t they practicing on a modern stack?
I’ll eat my words if Starliner can rapidly transition to another booster. But given its track record in software alone, I’m incredibly sceptical.
Starliner/Atlas wouldn't be affected, and so ensure the US and our allies have access to the station without getting Russia involved.
The mistakes on this project are well summarized by an Ars article this week, mostly coming down to the well known management issues plus an inability to operate in a fixed price procurement setting; everything about their organization depended on cost plus structures.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...
I may be wrong, but I believe both Starliner and Dragon were commissioned when Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby threatening NASA’s access to Soyuz.
I do not think there is a world where NASA commissions something from Boeing, and it's kind of ready-ish 2 years later. There are meetings to be head! Congress folk to talk to! Overruns to be budgeted!
SpaceX flew its first full crewed mission in 2020, and Boeing can't even put together a test flight in 2024. What a bloated, underskilled contractor robbing the taxpayer blind...took 1.5x more money than SpaceX and can't even deliver anything 10 years later.
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.
It's not uncommon for the aerospace industry to lose touch with reality. They consistently get told how amazing they are and budgets just keep on coming. When an actual competitor enters the market, they get caught in utter disbelief.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-...
Instead, the experts who have been doing this for half a century suck balls while the newcomer from a software engineering background who didn't stay in his lane made it.
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.
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 a fantastic clip out there where Gwynne Shotwell is asked by someone (I think in congress) how they are able to launch so cheap. Her answer was approximately "I don't know how to build a four hundred million dollar rocket."
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.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/top-us-launch-compan...
SpaceX had 98 launches in 2023.
ULA, the closest competitor, had 3.
For all of these others, considering that this article is from 2022, how many of them even still exist?
Don't get me wrong, I hope SpaceX gets some stiff competition because I believe that competition breeds innovation. At the moment, however, I have no idea where that is going to come from or when it might reasonably come.
As I said, the launch industry in the US is robust.
They are the competition and the innovation. I don't see them slacking off until they get to Mars at least.
What would a healthy launch industry look like? I don't think that 2022 article necessarily describes one. There is the long bet that won (SpaceX, reuse), the dino (ULA), a NZ transplant still mostly launching outside the US (RocketLab), some hopeful looking startups and always over the horizon Blue Origin.
This is a much better situation than the EU caught between the unpalatable antique (Soyuz) and the sailboat waiting for a cargo (Ariane 6).
However, it doesn't seem as healthy as the Chinese launch industry, which seems to have many providers launching and iterating with differentiated designs [0], bread-and-butter heavy launches from Long Marches (48 in 2023) [1] and continued work with the Tiangong space station [2]. It doesn't quite compute for me that commies don't have everything under proletarian central control, but they sure seem to be letting a hundred flowers bloom for now.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_space_program#List_of_...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Long_March_launches_(2...
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? Granted it's not the same thing as rockets, but still, with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?
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...)
That has nothing to do with it. Boeing has been a cost-plus defense contractor for so long managed doesn't know how to do fixed-price work. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...
Back in 2023 Boeing execs even said so: https://www.missouribusinessalert.com/industries/technology/...
Prior to the pandemic and the 737Max debacle, though, Boeing would low-bid fixed-price contracts and eat the losses because their commercial aircraft business would cover it, then make up the difference with continued sales. https://www.defenseone.com/business/2022/04/boeings-low-ball...
The only folks who weren't trying here were senior management, who were unable to do anything that wasn't milking the cost-plus contract cow.
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.
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.
There just wasn't an appetite for risk and reinvention, at least not enough to bring it down and start over, the way an eccentric billionaire could.
So that they can keep up with any eventual newcomers?
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
SpaceX also got far less money, Boeing received like 80% more money.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
Correct, and I never said it was
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/why-valves-are-a-spacecraf...
Rocket seems pretty trustworthy
Sensationalist headline is sensationalist, correct in the best kind of correct.
The headline could be an infinite number of ways more descriptive instead of riding on the coattails of the Boeing bash bandwagon:
"ULA scrubs launch of first crewed Boeing Starliner due to faulty valve in Atlas V."
"Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed due to faulty valve in launch vehicle."
etc.
Also Boeing is 50% ULA.
