Boeing was perceived by much of the industry as the blueblood of spaceflight while SpaceX was the company that was going to kill astronauts due to its supposed recklessness.
Given leadership at both companies I wouldn't feel too comfortable being an astronaut these days.
I disagree. SpaceX is rumoured to have hired an “Elon babysitter” and Gwynne Shotwell seems to know what she’s doing.
But musk sucks.
The good news is that he’s so busy with Twitter and Tesla that he’s left spaceX alone.
I think Elon has become (or perhaps always was) an ass, but somehow he knows how to hire some pretty smart people.
I will say confideny that the problems with Tesla and Twitter's daily operations are with Elon being directly involved daily.
SpaceX has Gwynne to actually run daily operations and it's just fine. Elon says his usual shit, but it doesn't affect daily processes. The same cannot be said for Twitter and Tesla.
Agreed.
Gwynne runs the show at SpaceX, and frankly, she's fucking awesome at her job. The CEO is a blowhard, but Gwynne is calling the shots day to day.
I don't know why anyone would think that of Boeing. They did fuck all for space until acquiring McDonnell Douglas and parts of Rockwell in like 1997. Then they spun most of that off into ULA with Lockheed precisely because they didn't know what to do with it. Lockheed people have even run ULA for it's entire existence.
The part of Boeing behind Starliner isn't all that old. It's certainly younger and seemingly less talented than ULA.
I don’t know why anyone would think that of Boeing.
That's an easy question to answer: because most people think "big established aerospace company == must be competent, right?" and don't know any of the other stuff you wrote.
State of journalism these days unfortunately. I've learned more about all this by simply reading and listening to the NASA briefs myself. Which you'd think the guy who writes all the Ars articles about space stuff would also do being their job and all.
Dude for real. I'd rather strap myself to the rockets those sliderule nerds used to make.
Boeing has jumped the shark entirely. A company that used to be run by engineers is now a shell of its former self and run by MBAs.
It’s literally the flayed corpse of Boeing being worn by the parasitic McDonnell Douglas.
For what it’s worth, I used to work for the former Boeing CEO who blew up the company. He seemed unrepentant. Totally just a normal dude having a normal time. His WIFE however. Holy shit was she a ball of anxiety. She was so anxious she would give her elderly dog drugs to “calm him down.” The lady was a wreck.
Guess she wasn't a psychopath
Sounds like an abuse victim.
She wore the guilt in the family.
Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.
The whole world will be watching that and if it fails, so will Boeing.
What a fucking mess Boeing's gotten itself into.
Not to worry. I’m sure the Boeing executives golden parachutes will save them.
Probably not even Boeing's space program.
Airbus can't just jump in and suddenly make all the planes to replace Boeing's civilian sector. Moreover they are irreplaceable in the defence sector. If Boeing really is to go down completly, it will take years of bad news.
Well it has been a few years of bad news.......
It's not clear to me that they are irreplaceable. If enough of their planes fall apart, you have no choice but to replace them. And also, if Boeing is so incompetent that they can't get anything right, that's a good argument for nationalizing the company. If they're necessary but incompetent, and all track records indicate that they are getting worse, then the only solution is to take them over.
This is the way. Bail them out when they tank, but do so with a 51% (pr more!) stock purchase by the gov on behalf of the people/society. Force a new board. Fix the company. If they're ever profitable again they're free to buy their stock back from the gov at the market price. I'm not usually a capitalist, but an /actual/ capitalist bailout seems like a good way to fix the rot in this case.
Boeing has already failed... to what scale will be directly proportional to how big of a fireball this thing turns into.
We all know it's, at best, burning itself on reentry.
To say Boeing has gloriously fucked up is an understatement
Damn you know they have real doubt about Starliner with this decision. People were saying Nasa was just being super careful and the vehicle was perfectly fine like Boeing said. But with the astronauts being forced to use Crew Dragon, they can't wear their space suits. Because the suits they use on Starliner aren't compatible with all the SpaceX stuff. This can be a big risk, if there is a problem with the vehicle, the astronauts have no protection. But Nasa must have decided that was a smaller risk over using the Starliner. That says a lot.
Can't they just send up extra suits with the dragon capsule? Badly fitted suits are probably better than none, it's not like they are piloting it down.
NASA has the measurements of all their astronauts and Dragon flight suits for Butch and Suni are already made.
They're sending spaceX suits up with crew dragon. They'd never allow anyone to re-enter without a suit.
I haven't seen that in any official reports yet. Mind sharing where you saw that?
2 suits and 2 seats are coming up on Crew 9 in about a month.
The last thing NASA wants to do is to loose astronauts during a mission. This would just be compounded by the fact it is an election year.
If returning with a proven Dragon capsule is even a few percentage points safer than returning with Starliner that has thruster issues, they are going to do it.
Boeing royally screwed up the entire Dreamliner program as well as Artemis production. With Sierra’s Dreamchaser potentially coming online as third alternative for manned space flight. I doubt NASA has fewer issues with letting Boeing go at this point.
Oh no that's so embarrassing! Fucking Elon going to milk that for all its worth.
I hope the astronauts make it back safely.
That being said, can you imagine the irony of a Dragon capsule coming to rescue them to their deaths?
I know it is corporate incompetence, but part of me wants to believe the Russians infiltrated Boeing and secretly altered repair records or falsified safety inspections just so that America's Airspace industry would fall apart and Russki Musk could swoop in and take over.
I wouldn't describe this as corporate incompetence. I would say the corporation is functioning exactly as the bosses wanted it to. They got their market dominance, they got their assurances of bailouts no matter how much they messed up, and they decided to make as much money for themselves as possible. It's a total success story, for a small group of people, as long as you don't consider all of the damage that was done on the side.
Another way of looking at it is to say that the system is functioning as intended. It's just that we wish otherwise.
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