9 ms·

The incredible thing about this is that when NASA gave the contract to both Boeing and SpaceX, SpaceX was supposed to be the risky new startup and Boeing was su

by mantap 7y ago

The incredible thing about this is that when NASA gave the contract to both Boeing and SpaceX, SpaceX was supposed to be the risky new startup and Boeing was supposed to be the safe "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" backup option. How times have changed.

2rsf 7y ago
If you are hinting that SpaceX is better than Boeing then check again, they might be as good (or bad). SpaceX are not bug free [1] and their development culture is far from being perfect [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877142 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760
- azernik 7y ago
  Neither are referring to flight avionics, which are run by a separate team.
- CheesecakeFred 7y ago
  Are you shilling against SpaceX, or was that worded slightly weird, or what? Bug-free is a ridiculous theoretical concept, where there are humans at work, there are bugs. As for 'perfect development culture', same thing. Ridiculous concept. There is always something to improve on. But would I personally, with my limited knowledge about Boeing and SpaceX, but with the catastrophic fails at Boeing regarding the 737 MAX in mind, judge SpaceX the more competent company in terms of management engineering skills, efficiency, to get a product as bug-free as they can without putting money before safety concerns? OF COURSE. There is no question.
fredoralive 7y ago
SpaceX have had their fair share of issues as well, such as the whole “launch abort test blowing up the entire capsule” thing. Space is hard…
- imglorp 7y ago
  It's not about blowing stuff up. Everyone blows stuff up in aerospace. It's about engineering culture: learning from everything, folding back into product and process, and improving every revision so that failure never recurs. It's the only way to make money in that business. Boeing used to be that culture, but has abandoned its 100 years of wisdom. Now, instead of learning from a mistake, they use marketing, blame, and PR to steer the balance sheet, not the product. They try to influence regulators instead of physics. And holy cow, this is a long list of incidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
  - Swenrekcah 7y ago
    Just to add for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... By eyeballing the list the 737 has roughly 2-3 times the incident count. Both families have ~10k units produced according to wikipedia.
    - jiofih 7y ago
      Total years of operation is significantly longer for Boeing though.
- robkop 7y ago
  I may be misremembering but if I recall correctly SpaceX hasn't had a failure in a launch abort test. Only in a static firing test (in regards to dragon 2).
  - foobarbecue 7y ago
    Correct, it was a vibe test with superdracos running well beyond expected operating conditions.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Really that pattern (technically antipattern) shows why things degraded the way they are. If the "default option" is taken as granted there is no incentive for it to stay adequate let alone improve and advance like it should and a "profiteer" temptation to monetize the fixed demand grows until a breaking point is reached. Which is why in any smart organization should ironically fire someone for "choosing IBM because nobody got fired for it". Not because it is the standard but because the butt covering over actual quality is a self fufilling prophecy of trouble. Essentially choosing IBM in itself is fine so long as you do at least a surface evaluation to be sure it is actually a better choice instead of cover which subverts the actual root function.
- emn13 7y ago
  Also why anti-monopoly laws need to be reevaluated, and improved to ensure nothing counts as a market with fewer than 10 practical competitors at any given moment, and probably more like 100 for real competition (or some similar set of thresholds to ensure flexibility). We've sacrificed meaningful constant progress at the altar of relatively speaking small economies of scale. That's a win... for the first few years; and a loss for the hundreds thereafter. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a segment where there's essentially one one or two providers; some things may be natural monopolies. But if so - those suppliers are essentially governments of their fiefdoms, and deserve similar restrictions, including most particularly, no incentive-distorting profit motive.
  - cglace 7y ago
    Should the government prop up 10 competitors in every industry? Is there a geographical threshold? If there is one plumber in a small town should the government prop up more or punish the one guy who wants to serve that market? Does market size matter? What if I discovered a super niche market that no one serves should we assume this market needs 10-100 competitors? Off the top of my head I have 100s of other questions and problems with your idea. I think picking a constant number to apply throughout the entire economy is going to be fraught with edge cases.
    - 7y ago
hurricanetc 7y ago
Boeing is used to delivering late and over budget. They haven’t had to really compete in decades. And NASA awarded them $2 billion more than SpaceX. Boeing is just a bloated, incompetent, and corrupt mess of a company.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  They got fat and complacent, and they can no longer do the thing competitively at all. SpaceX has lapped them on new spacecraft development as well as cost. And I don't think they'll be the last, either. I'd sooner trust a new design out of Blue Origin over Boeing, as well.
Gravityloss 7y ago
The "IBM" of human spacecraft, that built the Apollo CSM and Space Shuttle was North American which indeed was acquired by Boeing. McDonnell built the earlier smaller Mercury and Gemini, and it also was acquired by Boeing. Space shuttle was started 50 years ago and Apollo 60 years ago. So not so much continuity. CCDev contracts were awarded 6 years ago in 2014. Earlier, in 2011, Lockheed beat Northrop Grumman for the bigger Orion spacecraft.
- thatcherc 7y ago
  There's an excellent book called Angle of Attack by Mike Gray that follows North American's development of their part of Apollo, as well as touching on the immense efforts of all the other contractors in the program. It's not too long a book and reads like an adventure story despite being nonfiction, which I think just speaks to the kind of cowboy mentality that went into building a moon rocket in such a short time. Also neat because the other big players are companies like Lockheed, Northrop, Martin, McDonnell, Grumman, and Douglass -- all before their eventual mergers!
  - DennisP 7y ago
    > cowboy mentality that went into building a moon rocket in such a short time Haven't read the book but that kinda sounds like SpaceX today.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
digikata 7y ago
The other thing is that for this area, Boeing the corporation is mostly a brand. The Apollo and Shuttle engineers are overwhelmingly retired or, err, passed. At this point, no company in America really has an edge with experienced employees with designing and qualifying a new human-rated space vehicle. SpaceX and Boeing were really pretty close to the same starting line. And really SpaceX had a general experience edge in terms of coming off of designing a lot of wholly new and successfully working non-human rated space gear. Boeing has experience in maintaining working space gear and process, but it's not the same scale of new product and process.
throwaway_tech 7y ago
>How times have changed. I think a major part of this, as applied to SpaceX and Boeing, is historically NASA micromanaged their contractors on cost+ based contracts. That is where companies like Boeing thrived, tell Boeing exactly what to do, they can do it and at the same time they can jack up the costs so cost+ is as lucrative as possible. Now that contracting has changed and NASA no longer micromanages but just give the contractors top down goals within a given budget, we see how bad legacy contractors like Boeing are when not micromanaged, and given budgets, rather than cost+ contracts.

by mantap 7y ago

2rsf 7y ago

If you are hinting that SpaceX is better than Boeing then check again, they might be as good (or bad). SpaceX are not bug free [1] and their development culture is far from being perfect [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877142 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760

azernik 7y ago
Neither are referring to flight avionics, which are run by a separate team.
CheesecakeFred 7y ago
Are you shilling against SpaceX, or was that worded slightly weird, or what? Bug-free is a ridiculous theoretical concept, where there are humans at work, there are bugs. As for 'perfect development culture', same thing. Ridiculous concept. There is always something to improve on. But would I personally, with my limited knowledge about Boeing and SpaceX, but with the catastrophic fails at Boeing regarding the 737 MAX in mind, judge SpaceX the more competent company in terms of management engineering skills, efficiency, to get a product as bug-free as they can without putting money before safety concerns? OF COURSE. There is no question.

fredoralive 7y ago

SpaceX have had their fair share of issues as well, such as the whole “launch abort test blowing up the entire capsule” thing. Space is hard…

imglorp 7y ago
It's not about blowing stuff up. Everyone blows stuff up in aerospace. It's about engineering culture: learning from everything, folding back into product and process, and improving every revision so that failure never recurs. It's the only way to make money in that business. Boeing used to be that culture, but has abandoned its 100 years of wisdom. Now, instead of learning from a mistake, they use marketing, blame, and PR to steer the balance sheet, not the product. They try to influence regulators instead of physics. And holy cow, this is a long list of incidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
- Swenrekcah 7y ago
  Just to add for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... By eyeballing the list the 737 has roughly 2-3 times the incident count. Both families have ~10k units produced according to wikipedia.
  - jiofih 7y ago
    Total years of operation is significantly longer for Boeing though.
robkop 7y ago
I may be misremembering but if I recall correctly SpaceX hasn't had a failure in a launch abort test. Only in a static firing test (in regards to dragon 2).
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  Correct, it was a vibe test with superdracos running well beyond expected operating conditions.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Really that pattern (technically antipattern) shows why things degraded the way they are. If the "default option" is taken as granted there is no incentive for it to stay adequate let alone improve and advance like it should and a "profiteer" temptation to monetize the fixed demand grows until a breaking point is reached. Which is why in any smart organization should ironically fire someone for "choosing IBM because nobody got fired for it". Not because it is the standard but because the butt covering over actual quality is a self fufilling prophecy of trouble. Essentially choosing IBM in itself is fine so long as you do at least a surface evaluation to be sure it is actually a better choice instead of cover which subverts the actual root function.

emn13 7y ago
Also why anti-monopoly laws need to be reevaluated, and improved to ensure nothing counts as a market with fewer than 10 practical competitors at any given moment, and probably more like 100 for real competition (or some similar set of thresholds to ensure flexibility). We've sacrificed meaningful constant progress at the altar of relatively speaking small economies of scale. That's a win... for the first few years; and a loss for the hundreds thereafter. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a segment where there's essentially one one or two providers; some things may be natural monopolies. But if so - those suppliers are essentially governments of their fiefdoms, and deserve similar restrictions, including most particularly, no incentive-distorting profit motive.
- cglace 7y ago
  Should the government prop up 10 competitors in every industry? Is there a geographical threshold? If there is one plumber in a small town should the government prop up more or punish the one guy who wants to serve that market? Does market size matter? What if I discovered a super niche market that no one serves should we assume this market needs 10-100 competitors? Off the top of my head I have 100s of other questions and problems with your idea. I think picking a constant number to apply throughout the entire economy is going to be fraught with edge cases.
  - 7y ago

hurricanetc 7y ago

Boeing is used to delivering late and over budget. They haven’t had to really compete in decades. And NASA awarded them $2 billion more than SpaceX. Boeing is just a bloated, incompetent, and corrupt mess of a company.

CydeWeys 7y ago
They got fat and complacent, and they can no longer do the thing competitively at all. SpaceX has lapped them on new spacecraft development as well as cost. And I don't think they'll be the last, either. I'd sooner trust a new design out of Blue Origin over Boeing, as well.

Gravityloss 7y ago

The "IBM" of human spacecraft, that built the Apollo CSM and Space Shuttle was North American which indeed was acquired by Boeing. McDonnell built the earlier smaller Mercury and Gemini, and it also was acquired by Boeing. Space shuttle was started 50 years ago and Apollo 60 years ago. So not so much continuity. CCDev contracts were awarded 6 years ago in 2014. Earlier, in 2011, Lockheed beat Northrop Grumman for the bigger Orion spacecraft.

thatcherc 7y ago
There's an excellent book called Angle of Attack by Mike Gray that follows North American's development of their part of Apollo, as well as touching on the immense efforts of all the other contractors in the program. It's not too long a book and reads like an adventure story despite being nonfiction, which I think just speaks to the kind of cowboy mentality that went into building a moon rocket in such a short time. Also neat because the other big players are companies like Lockheed, Northrop, Martin, McDonnell, Grumman, and Douglass -- all before their eventual mergers!
- DennisP 7y ago
  > cowboy mentality that went into building a moon rocket in such a short time Haven't read the book but that kinda sounds like SpaceX today.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

digikata 7y ago

The other thing is that for this area, Boeing the corporation is mostly a brand. The Apollo and Shuttle engineers are overwhelmingly retired or, err, passed. At this point, no company in America really has an edge with experienced employees with designing and qualifying a new human-rated space vehicle. SpaceX and Boeing were really pretty close to the same starting line. And really SpaceX had a general experience edge in terms of coming off of designing a lot of wholly new and successfully working non-human rated space gear. Boeing has experience in maintaining working space gear and process, but it's not the same scale of new product and process.

throwaway_tech 7y ago

>How times have changed. I think a major part of this, as applied to SpaceX and Boeing, is historically NASA micromanaged their contractors on cost+ based contracts. That is where companies like Boeing thrived, tell Boeing exactly what to do, they can do it and at the same time they can jack up the costs so cost+ is as lucrative as possible. Now that contracting has changed and NASA no longer micromanages but just give the contractors top down goals within a given budget, we see how bad legacy contractors like Boeing are when not micromanaged, and given budgets, rather than cost+ contracts.