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> The Crew Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is no longer targeting Saturday, May 25. We're awaiting official word from NASA and Boeing on the next p

> The Crew Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is no longer targeting Saturday, May 25. We're awaiting official word from NASA and Boeing on the next possible launch date and for more information regarding the path forward on the helium leak. What happened to good or even okay spacecraft design? A good design would mean this is easy to troubleshoot and would not impact the launch date because it could be fixed well ahead of time. How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today? It was a scrappier time, to say the least.

tim333 2y ago
>How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years The US is doing great over at SpaceX. It's just Boeing who are kind of crap these days. Quite a lot is explained if you listen to Musk on the founding of SpaceX around 5:20 where he is talking about a small team of top engineers and not much management. Boeing is I think not like that https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240
atrus 2y ago
NASA has had spectacular success though...just with SpaceX, who got half the money Boeing did to develop a human rated craft.
- metadat 2y ago
  That's not NASA doing anything, though. In fact it's NASA doing nothing except saying what they want to a genie. Rub rub.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > That's not NASA doing anything COTS was a risky paradigm shift. And SpaceX continues to extensively use NASA resources, to say nothing of building on its decades of work.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      This. COTS was critical. Space Act Agreements are how things get done and optimizing for fixed priced, milestone based SAAs has been great for all "routine" things that NASA doesn't have to do extensive novel R&D to make happen, things like transportation, which is all space launch is these days. SpaceX lives because of COTS and that's great. But that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005. It's commodity infrastructure and SpaceX, unlike Boeing and others, has a workable commodity style approach so they're eating everyone's lunch. Then SpaceX developed reusability because of its Mars ambitions and re-usable Falcon sealed the deal on industry dominance. No one can touch SpaceX's ~$20M F9 launch cost so SpaceX gobbles up any contracts that aren't locked down by law.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005 It wasn’t boring so much as gated. If anything, nobody recognised it had become a commodity outside a couple crazy dudes in Hawthorne and West Texas. The majors still talked about it like they were doing dark magic.
lukan 2y ago
"Why was the U.S./Nasa so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today?" Because they moved fast and broke things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 Also because they had way more money and broad public support.
- metadat 2y ago
  I was just reading an HN submission yesterday saying the risks for astronauts today are actually worse than what they faced in the Apollo missions 50 years ago. Unproven vehicles with a human onboard from launch #1 -- hello SLS. Sounds like a real gas. Here's TFA: The lunacy of Artemis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404 - 1 day ago, 487 comments
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Did you see this comment in that thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416267 Artemis is risky, but not to the levels that Apollo was.
    - metadat 2y ago
      It's hard to say, though, because the system is totally untested. Even if it works the first time, That's a very small sample size.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        NASA has gotten a lot better at estimating risk, especially after two Shuttle explosions taught them the hard way that they were really bad at it. Applying those methods to Apollo shows us just how lucky we are that we didn't lose any of them. NASA claims that their risk of catastrophe on Artemis 2 is 1 in 400. They'd have to be wrong by a couple orders of magnitude to be comparable to the Apollo missions. I might not trust their 1 in 400 number, but I don't think they're off by 2 orders of magnitude. The endless Starliner delays are another sign of this. They could launch Starliner with the helium leak and everything would probably be fine. But they're not. They've lost astronauts to "go fever" and have instituted a much more risk averse culture.

tim333 2y ago

>How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years The US is doing great over at SpaceX. It's just Boeing who are kind of crap these days. Quite a lot is explained if you listen to Musk on the founding of SpaceX around 5:20 where he is talking about a small team of top engineers and not much management. Boeing is I think not like that https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240

atrus 2y ago

NASA has had spectacular success though...just with SpaceX, who got half the money Boeing did to develop a human rated craft.

metadat 2y ago
That's not NASA doing anything, though. In fact it's NASA doing nothing except saying what they want to a genie. Rub rub.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > That's not NASA doing anything COTS was a risky paradigm shift. And SpaceX continues to extensively use NASA resources, to say nothing of building on its decades of work.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    This. COTS was critical. Space Act Agreements are how things get done and optimizing for fixed priced, milestone based SAAs has been great for all "routine" things that NASA doesn't have to do extensive novel R&D to make happen, things like transportation, which is all space launch is these days. SpaceX lives because of COTS and that's great. But that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005. It's commodity infrastructure and SpaceX, unlike Boeing and others, has a workable commodity style approach so they're eating everyone's lunch. Then SpaceX developed reusability because of its Mars ambitions and re-usable Falcon sealed the deal on industry dominance. No one can touch SpaceX's ~$20M F9 launch cost so SpaceX gobbles up any contracts that aren't locked down by law.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005 It wasn’t boring so much as gated. If anything, nobody recognised it had become a commodity outside a couple crazy dudes in Hawthorne and West Texas. The majors still talked about it like they were doing dark magic.

lukan 2y ago

"Why was the U.S./Nasa so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today?" Because they moved fast and broke things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 Also because they had way more money and broad public support.

metadat 2y ago
I was just reading an HN submission yesterday saying the risks for astronauts today are actually worse than what they faced in the Apollo missions 50 years ago. Unproven vehicles with a human onboard from launch #1 -- hello SLS. Sounds like a real gas. Here's TFA: The lunacy of Artemis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404 - 1 day ago, 487 comments
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Did you see this comment in that thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416267 Artemis is risky, but not to the levels that Apollo was.
  - metadat 2y ago
    It's hard to say, though, because the system is totally untested. Even if it works the first time, That's a very small sample size.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      NASA has gotten a lot better at estimating risk, especially after two Shuttle explosions taught them the hard way that they were really bad at it. Applying those methods to Apollo shows us just how lucky we are that we didn't lose any of them. NASA claims that their risk of catastrophe on Artemis 2 is 1 in 400. They'd have to be wrong by a couple orders of magnitude to be comparable to the Apollo missions. I might not trust their 1 in 400 number, but I don't think they're off by 2 orders of magnitude. The endless Starliner delays are another sign of this. They could launch Starliner with the helium leak and everything would probably be fine. But they're not. They've lost astronauts to "go fever" and have instituted a much more risk averse culture.