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I find it amazing that this is treated as such a trivial achievement, with an attitude as if any one of us could have done this. Now back to our regularly sched
by wannacboatmovie 2y ago
I find it amazing that this is treated as such a trivial achievement, with an attitude as if any one of us could have done this. Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
- Cacti 2y ago[flagged]
- pfdietz 2y agoNot trivial, but also not consequential.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- saberience 2y agoIt's a nice new capsule launching on top of a 20+ year old launch system (Atlas V). It's a great accomplishment but it's not "super crazy"
- malfist 2y agoIt took them a decade and a half to make this thing. I think that alone speaks to the complexity of this achievement.
- saberience 2y agoI'm not shitting on Starliner, it's great that we have another person-rated capsule for spaceflight. I'm just pointing this out because there are many people apparently who are confusing Starliner for Boeing's version of Starship, i.e. a whole rocket plus crew rated capsule.
- dylan604 2y agoStarliner would be more rightly compared to Crew Dragon. Why would anyone compare to Starship?
- HWR_14 2y agoThe names are very similar.
- dylan604 2y ago[flagged]
- ericd 2y agoWell, "ocean liner" means a large oceangoing ship, "airliner" means large airplane, so people could be forgiven for thinking a "starliner" was a large spaceship and not a tiny pod.
- indoordin0saur 2y agoBut Star Dingy doesn't have the same ring to it.
- ericd 2y agoHaha zodiac would be a good fit, though.
- wubrr 2y agoLet's not forget that this is modern Boeing we're talking about... the long timeline could just be incompetence.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoHow long did it take Spacex to develop their human rated capsule? I think that was 10+ years as well
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Retric 2y agoDepends on what you consider starting. 16 years is probably the most reasonable number, but you could argue for as little as 6. Initial work on Dragon began in 2004, it ‘entered service’ in 2009, had its first mission in 2010, but first connected to the ISS in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon Work on a crewed version was officially mentioned in 2006 though they only got a contract for manned missions in 2014 and the first manned mission was 16 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
- dotnet00 2y agoIIRC it took SpaceX ~7 years. It's kind of useful perspective that when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart. Plus the extra $400M they extorted out of NASA despite this being a fixed price, milestone based contract.
- nordsieck 2y ago> when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart. I think it's useful to note that this wasn't just Boeing's opinion - it was pretty widely believed in the industry. And not without reason - Boeing had Shuttle heritage. Thankfully, NASA kept both awards.
- Retric 2y agoIt wan’t an inaccurate assessment. SpaceX was working on life support for a crewed module 14+ years before their first successful manned launch. IE: It took them longer than Boeing. However the missing context is SpaceX put in 8+ years into the project before getting the award which offset most of the issues. So it worked out well for NASA, but SpaceX was approaching it more as a prestige project than a profitable one.
- tw04 2y agoIt took them a decade and a half because Boeing learned the hard way that you have to actually be efficient when you don’t get a cost plus contract. Their entire system was setup to extract as much money from the government as possible, not to deliver product on time. Late and over a budget is how you maximize profit in cost plus contracts.
- elteto 2y agoYes, one year for each unnecessary layer of middle management at Boeing.
- kragen 2y agoit speaks to the lamentable state of boeing
- idontwantthis 2y agoI think it is materially less exciting than it would have been if it had launched years ago when it was scheduled to. It provides competition with SpaceX in one very small niche of space travel with no applications to any other niche. Meanwhile SpaceX is building a Mars rocket with in flight refueling. I really wish they did have more competition, and I also hope they succeed.
- FireBeyond 2y agoI think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear, Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or at least different expectations). How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge). But as a NASA person said - NASA-funded contracts "can't" have failures. They obviously do, but he was more talking to the acceptability, political and otherwise. One or two launchpad explosions of a taxpayer funded vehicle and you're fighting Congressional demands to shut down the entire program. SpaceX provides a layer of abstraction and indirection to that, so they can move faster - "Who cares if we blow up 10 in the next couple of years to get to one that works".
- ragebol 2y agoBoeing and SpaceX are both not NASA, so same level of indirection. If Boeing went the iterative route with some failed experimental launches, that could/should be just as acceptable. But they didn't, they went for the first time right approach, but that failed too. If you are going to have failures, maybe just accept that first time right doesn't exist, or just takes much much longer.
- theultdev 2y agoWell, that's how you build rockets successfully. Either you make fast iteration acceptable, regardless of politics, or you fail. It's not just political process either, it's the technical process. You need to be able to debug, fix, and manufacture the iterations quickly.
- rainyMammoth 2y agoYeah for some reason when SpaceX did it we couldn’t stop hearing about it. When OldTech does it, nobody cares.
- freeopinion 2y agoQuick, without cheating, can you name the second human being to run a mile in less than four minutes? Can you name the current world record holder? I guess that most people in my small town don't know who Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has done it since. I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
- chgs 2y agoIf old tech had done it 5 years ago then that would have been newsworthy. The first jet flight across the Atlantic was newsworthy. The 837th isn’t.
- seydor 2y agoEvery one of the thousands of brain surgeries and heart surgery are also remarkable.
- amelius 2y agoAt some point we'll have to think of it as trivial, otherwise what progress are we making?
- falcor84 2y agoUnlike science (and particularly math) where everything is trivial unless novel, in most endeavors these are too separate axes. For example, there's no progress or novelty in a sports team winning a championship, but it's definitely not trivial to win. Same for an engineering project - there are many cathedrals out there, but building a new one never became trivial.
- amelius 2y agoLet's say: if you can just open the manual and start building, then it is trivial. We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
- bluGill 2y agoBuilding a new Falcon 9 is trivial - spacex as built a lot already and knows how (or so we assume). However that is only true if you use the existing design as is. Change anything about the design (which we can assume spacex is doing from time to time) makes it non-trivial.
- amelius 2y agoOnly if you threw away all the tooling and knowledge of the previous design and started from scratch.
- nordsieck 2y ago> Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start building, then it is trivial. > We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial. Except that you're wrong. Because it's very common for the first launch of a company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to orbit. So you can't "just open the manual and start building".
- adolph 2y ago> Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps. "Ask not what flying cars can do for you; ask what 140 characters can do for your country." [0,1] "We choose to go to LEO. We choose to go to LEO... We choose to go to LEO in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but so that MIC will learn to build without cost-plus contracting" [2, 3] 0. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricular-resources/ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricul... 1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697729-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697729-we-wanted-flying-car... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon 3. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-plus-contract.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-plus-contract.asp
- amelius 2y agoRocket-science is just Newtonian physics ;)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- urda 2y agoRocket science isn't easy, I would know.
- barryrandall 2y agoIt's not trivial, but it's less interesting than the other news stories about Boeing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]