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Starliner Is Such a Disaster That Boeing May Cancel the Entire Project
- justahuman74 2y agoI hope they sell the program to Blue Origin, or Sierra, or really anyone who will take it
- pie420 2y agoCan we cancel Boeing as a company? Fire all of the C-suite, break up space, commercial airline, and defense businesses into separate corporations
- epicureanideal 2y agoAgreed. Yes, we have national security interests in having the capability to build airplanes, etc., but there must be a way to maintain that capability without permanently giving one company and its executives the right to mismanage unlimited amounts of money. Maybe some more flexible mechanism that can handle networks of smaller companies achieving the same end result.
- smileson2 2y agoIsn’t that sort of distributed setup what caused this in the first place? Boeing got addicted to cutting and outsourcing to improve the stock same shit that kills every bigco
- throwawayffffas 2y agoNo it's the other way around. The Boeing we have today is the result of mergers. For example McDonnell Douglas that built the f-18 amongst other things was acquired in 1996.
- rbanffy 2y agoThey merged the companies, but outsourced component manufacturing to the lowest bidder and didn’t bother to check the lowest bidder was actually delivering what was needed.
- floatrock 2y agoThe popular story is when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in the late 90's, Boeing's engineering-driven culture was replaced with the more financialization-driven culture from McDonnell execs. The 737-MAX saga was kinda the culmination of when profit-motivated shortcuts bump up against realities of engineering safety margins. I'm sure everyone has their campfire variation on this, tons has been written about it. So yeah on the financial shenanery, but more culture/people-in-charge than conglomeration-megacorp per-se.
- yfw 2y agoIf you consider it national interest, why as the biggest shareholder and bagholder do you not have board members that veto actions that are profitable but bad for national interest?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- striking 2y agoBoeing is a key part of the military-industrial complex and has very close ties to the US government (the movement of people between the two groups is especially interesting). "Too big to fail" might not accurately describe it. "Too connected to fail", maybe?
- partiallypro 2y agoBoeing, even without the military connection, is one of the more important companies in the US for exports. They are also too big to fail. It's very much in the national interest for them to right the ship. The same is true of Intel. Their domestic fabs are -very- important to NatSec.
- rbanffy 2y agoMaybe “Too strategic to fail”
- bryanlarsen 2y agoThey're too big and too important to go through Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but Chapter 11 bankruptcy can and should happen. Wipe out the shareholders and executives but keep the company intact.
- baq 2y agoMBAs extracted all value for the shareholders and now only the husk remains. Mission accomplished, onto the next.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoI can't see why you're being downvoted. The unfortunate reality is that those who implement policies that produce short term gain but long term costs that strike after they have moved on look better than those who actually look to the long haul.
- OrigamiPastrami 2y agoWhy solve a problem for real when pretending to solve it is so much more profitable?
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997848> Even if one agrees with the sentiment, it doesn't much advance the discussion, and there's ample shallow commentary on the thread already.
- FredPret 2y agoBoeing shareholders haven't earned a proper return in half a decade, but the idiots kept voting in the same blockhead of a CEO. Serves 'em right. Shareholders are almost always best served by a product-first CEO who maximizes the long-term value proposition of the company.
- Alupis 2y agoUnder what authority would US Government use to "Fire all the C-suite" and break Boeing into pieces? You not liking a company doesn't mean the federal government gets to nuke it from orbit...
- throwawayffffas 2y agoThey can't per say fire them. But they could start cancelling contracts if they think Boeing isn't going to deliver. And they can break up the company into smaller ones to foster competition this has happened in the past in other industries.
- lukan 2y agoIn the name of national security they could nationalize Boeing and then fire anyone they want. But this is a pretty big hammer, that comes at a price (and who really believes, the government will be more efficient at running Boeing?)
- yfw 2y agoNationalize it and replace the board. Imagine the govt as an activist investor if the profit driven investors are more keen to scrap it for profits.
- xnyan 2y agoSomething like the Defense Production Act alone technically gives the government the authority to control civilian production in virtually any way if it meets a standard based on criticality to national defense (not hard to imagine the argument for boeing). Using that power requires political support from the legislature and courts, I don't think we're there today, but if for example a critical fighter jet (or some other high visibility project) went south, boeing has been shitting the bed hard enough to support federal intervention.
- Alupis 2y agoWhich defense projects is Boeing lacking on? If anything, it seems their defense projects are the most competent side of present-day Boeing.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoAnd how well the weapons systems work??
- rbanffy 2y agoExpensively.
- robotnikman 2y agoTake it private and remove the incentives of having to appease shareholders over everything else
- yfw 2y agoStart a new company and hire all the engineers. Not like we need any of the C staff to make it function. There's plenty you can do, the obstacle is regulatory capture rather than lack of options
- ghaff 2y agoWhy would I want to hire all the engineers? Surely at least some share the blame. I don't really agree with you in general, but if I were starting a new company I'd probably be pretty selective about hiring Boeing engineers if I really thought it were a pervasive company culture problem.
- yfw 2y agoWhy is that your point of contention? If the goal is to have Boeing provide engineering capacity without all the cost cutting drama, all I'm suggesting is a change of governance.
- ghaff 2y agoAssuming there's a real cultural issue, I doubt that the C-suite is the entire problem. Just bringing in some new senior management is probably not the answer. You probably need to cull down to at least some level of mid-level people. At least that's what I would do.
- ARandomerDude 2y ago[flagged]
- mullingitover 2y agoIf we do, and SpaceX takes its place, it's only a matter of time before SpaceX ends up in with the exact same problems. It's not fair to compare the two companies on an apples to apples basis, as the rules they operate under may as well be from different planets. Boeing's problems come from the regulatory environment and congressional horse trading that created it. SpaceX doesn't have these constraints for now, but the moment SpaceX replaces Boeing all that scrutiny and backroom dealing that created Boeing will start to carry over.
- IX-103 2y agoI'm not sure Boeing's problems are entirely due to the bureaucratic horse trading that infests many government acquisition programs. That issue shouldn't have affected their commercial airplanes, which seems to suffer from similar quality issues. It actually seems to be a systemic issue that has been affecting many American companies and slowly grown worse over the last 50 years. The management views themselves as increasingly indispensable and the lower ranks of workers as commodities subject to arbitrage, where 10 years experience at this company is somehow just as valuable as 10 years somewhere else - despite not having the same institutional knowledge and connections. We've seen this with traditional "American" companies, such as Ford and GM, and even with the more established companies in the tech sector. This is fundamentally caused by a shift how management has operated. The emphasis on market performance over dividends and increasingly public role of business leadership. With that, executive compensation becomes another signal of a company's confidence as a tool to drive market price. Businesses compete over lavish executive perks not to find the best talent, but as conspicuous consumption to signal their value to investors. At the same time, human resources have worked to standardize and measure workers. Trying to turn them into interchangeable cogs, because it seems cheaper to think that way. But people are not cogs and reducing people to keywords on a resume loses valuable data. This is true when apples to oranges comparisons are made between the current employees and prospective employees. The precise nature of experience and how it maps to their company is lost so current employees are undervalued in the comparison. Likewise the value of proximity and relationships between management and workers and even local governments. This has lead to many off-shoring decisions that led to unexpected losses in the medium term, some of which were ultimately rolled back.
- nickff 2y agoThe title (and premise) of this post are entirely based on a Bloomberg piece (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-25/boeing-ceo-faces-hard-decisions-after-nasa-s-starliner-rejection?sref=YfHlo0rL https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-25/boeing-ce...), with nothing but fluff added.
- plumeria 2y agoHowever, this source is not paywalled.
- tithe 2y agoTo bypass the Bloomberg paywall in Chrome, add a dot after the TLD: https://www.bloomberg.com./news/articles/2024-08-25/boeing-ceo-faces-hard-decisions-after-nasa-s-starliner-rejection?sref=YfHlo0rL https://www.bloomberg.com./news/articles/2024-08-25/boeing-c...
- cwillu 2y agoI get a paywall with or without the dot.
- Nevermark 2y agoRegardless of sourcing, this is the kind of article that gets people talking, and can be self-fulfilling. I don't see the value to Boeing, or its traumatized shareholders, in continuing the losses. Starliner isn't fully reusable, so unlikely to ever be really profitable. It is a very poor start to any wider space ambitions. If I was Boeing's CEO, I would have confidentially got the conversation rolling too. But this is off the record, deep background. No attribution on those statements, please!
- rbanffy 2y ago> Starliner isn't fully reusable Neither is Dragon. Upper stage and service module are discarded. Only the booster and the capsule are reusable.
- bartkmq 2y agoI watched the NASA press conference, where the decision was announced, and Bill Nelson said that the new Boeing CEO promised him he will work with NASA to keep Starliner flying. It will require quite a significant investment to fix the project, while Boeing is already loosing money on this fixed price contract.
- schiffern 2y agoI expect Boeing's verbal promise is worth the paper it's written on.
- Nevermark 2y agoWhy create a round trip space craft, when you can build and discard two one-way craft for twice the price? (At first I didn't think this could really work, until I realized the second craft could have been towed up by the first.) Incredible kudos to SpaceX, when you consider its comparable competitors repeatedly fumble (Boeing), move slow (Blue Origin), lost their edge (Russia), fidget spinner themselves out of relevance (ULA, Arianespace, Orbital Sciences), whiffed (Sea Launch), or very "successfully" build, launch and discard fortunes (er, flights) for the purpose of justifying those same flights (er, fortunes) (NASA). Kudos to China too for some prolonged and relatively rapid progress. It will be interesting to see how that progress continues given the "Coolish War" we are now in.
- fredgrott 2y agoonly one problem with that narrative.... SpaceX has had the same exact cost overruns as Boeing.... Its a repeat of the space shuttle argument...which failed dramatically bigger in both costs and human deaths.
- schiffern 2y ago>the same exact cost overruns Tell me when SpaceX had to repeat an entire ISS test flight on their own dime because the first one was such a disaster? Boeing charged twice as much as SpaceX,[1] but at the time it was justified because Boeing was considered the "safe" option. How times change! [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/boeing-warns-of-more-financial-losses-on-starliner-commercial-crew-program/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/boeing-warns-of-more-f...
- Nevermark 2y ago> SpaceX has had the same exact cost overruns as Boeing Numbers? Boeing's partially accounted for cost overruns are quite hard to read. Their meter needs a pause button. Anyway, the relevant issue is net cost. SpaceX is currently going deeply negative unbounded. I.e. net profitable for customer launches.
- glzone1 2y agoExcept crew dragon is half the price and has flown repeatedly. SpaceX absolutely has had lots of test failures - they've probably blown up more rockets then many recent players - but their cadence is super quick, and their cost per item far far lower and they seem to be able to fix stuff.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: NASA's Starliner decision was the right one, but it's a crushing blow for Boeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41346778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41346778 Boeing employees 'humiliated' that upstart rival SpaceX will rescue astronauts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353404
- rbanffy 2y agoCould be worse. It could be a Soyuz.
- lpribis 2y agoThe Soyuz-MS which is currently on its 15th successful launch (prior to that had 1 abort without injury)? Versus Starliner which has ostensibly failed 2 out of it's 3 orbital flights to date, not to mention being scrubbed on the pad for critical valve issues and failing to open 1 out of 3 parachutes on its debut launch. I know which one I'd rather get into.
- ratg13 2y agoAre we sure the Starliner can make it back? Aren't there some questions about its capabilities because they seemed unable to do certain unmanned tests and there was speculation that they may have removed some of the autonomous software capabilities. Has this been disproven?
- jfengel 2y agoNo, they're not sure, which is why they're not putting people on it. It cannot currently get back on its own, but the capability exists. It's a software fix. They will try, which might even work. If it does it might even salvage the project. If it doesn't...
- rdtsc 2y agoLink to the OIG report https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pd... for SLS Block 1B > According to DCMA officials, this is a high number of CARs [Corrective Action Requests] for a space flight system at this stage in development and reflects a recurring and degraded state of product quality control. > Quality control issues at Michoud are largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing If this was to be a "jobs" program more than anything, I guess that makes sense. They just added more "jobs" but never actually bothered to train anyone. Doesn't Boeing worry how this looks on them? I would be terribly embarrassed if I was anywhere adjacent to that team's leadership. Searching for "Principles" brigs us to this page https://www.boeing.com/sustainability/values https://www.boeing.com/sustainability/values First item "Start with engineering excellence. A strong engineering foundation enables us to build and maintain our products with safety, quality and integrity in the factory and in service. Our customers expect it. That’s why we will always take the time to get the engineering right". Well, they failed their very first principle, didn't they. At least don't put it right at the top, hide it down at the bottom to at least avoid being accused of hypocrisy.
- sir-dingleberry 2y ago> Instead, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who flew up on the troubled capsule — will get a ride on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon in February. That's...a long way away.
- rbanffy 2y agoIt’s like a road trip to the coolest place in the solar system (for them) that gets unexpectedly extended.
- adamredwoods 2y agoI hope they don't cancel, instead, identify how to make things better. Iterate, learn, improve.
- commercialnix 2y agoSpaceX values meritocracy first and foremost. Boeing, not so much. One of these companies has a very bright future.
- fsckboy 2y ago>NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams...will get a ride [back] on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon in February. It's an extremely unfortunate development for Boeing That's not an unfortunate development at all. The decision to not risk human lives is based on what's already happened, it's not a new happening. If Starliner comes back successfully/safely, that will be a plus, and if it doesn't, that will be a new minus.
- khaki54 2y agoMy understanding was that this was a firm fixed price contract, not a cost contract. Boeing can't just cancel the contract once they are underwater, it would defeat the purpose of FFP which is to shift risk to the contractor. The government can and will demand specific performance. Usually with FFP the contractor will outline ALL assumptions made which the government will clarify and agree to. The contractor will price all of that out, apply a risk multiplier 1.5x - 2.0x and target a 30% margin on all of that. FFP contracts typically have the highest potential for profit vs. 'cost plus' contracts.
- Nevermark 2y agoNASA loses money and time waiting and helping Boeing to perform. And then they get minimal performance, given the program and company's now chronic underperformance. Meanwhile, SpaceX provides a solid tested path forward. Despite the single sourcing. I see a negotiated retreat, favorable to all parties. Likely in some incremental way to minimize attention and backlash. I.e. delay, study, delay, negotiate, delay, close up shop. Parterships operating under a legal gun don't really operate. And are not conducive to safety concerns.
- avmich 2y ago> Parterships operating under a legal gun don't really operate. It's business, nothing personal, right? Boeing can be welcome to bid on the next project - after siphoning and wasting lots of NASA's money on this one, and losing badly a solid chunk of its own because of internal problems. Why can't partnership continue? Nobody wants Boeing to go out of business, just to pay what they owe to taxpayers.
- Nevermark 2y agoWhen a long term business partnership becomes unattractive for one side, the lack of win-win degrades the relationship for both parties. It causes conflict between mutually valid but now competing priorities (profitability vs. contracted deliverables), demoralization, delays for analysis and consensus building around unpleasant decisions, key people moving on to better contexts, etc. I am not talking about bad faith. The primal cause could be failure by one party. But it could also be a market change, critical supplier loss, or other unrecognized reality surfacing. If Boeing and NASA cut losses on Starliner, they could still work together in the future. Presumably, with both sides doing a better job of understanding their respective and joint risks. -- Never mistake a good partnership contract, with a good partnership. More than a good contract has to come together for the latter. And it is wise to have pre-settled terms for unwinding contracts at any time by either parties discretion, to reduce the time to correct a bad situation, and minimize the costs of mishaps and distractions for everyone.
- worstspotgain 2y agoI really, really hope Boeing doesn't cancel Starliner. Trading a public space monopoly for a private one would be a huge net negative for the country. The SpaceX leadership has goals that can be opaque and need not align with NASA's. Recently, in the context of X and Tesla, they've bordered on deranged and even anti-American. If Boeing can get out of the learning phase, even as an imperfect company, it can provide a most valuable service even if its platform is nominally second best.
- 627467 2y agoIt is depressing that the only option is to keep throwing money at an sclerotic, extractive, incomponent player. How pro-american has boeing been in the past 20 years really?
- asadotzler 2y agoBoeing isn't the only possible competitor to Crew Dragon, but even it it were, the ISS is dead in 5 years, so who really cares about a short-term Dragon monopoly. Focus on the future and stop throwing good money after bad with Boeing and over the ancient ISS which is about 85% of the way to incineration.
- worstspotgain 2y agoWell it's the work of the present. Those who survive the present will build the future. Any steady state scenario with one company getting more than 40% of the contracts is fundamentally worse than in-housing at NASA.
- TinkersW 2y agoBoeing isn't in a learning phase... more of a how much can we underpay our employees and how many cheap subtractors can we get away with phase. Also starliner would not be "nominally" second best, but truly second, or perhaps third best if other options come around(dreamchaser). Musk may be huffing the right wing nonsense too much, but I don't know if he has actually done anything anti-american(though supporting someone as obviously corrupt as Trump could be considered so I suppose), much of the headlines about him appear to be clickbait nonsense. SpaceX can't do jack shit without Gov approval, so it wouldn't really matter if they had ulterior motives.
- Havoc 2y agoWould be a pity - maybe they can run cargo missions with it instead for a while? But yeah just keeps pointing to the same issue: pervasive culture problems. Can't fix that by cancelling projects
- rbanffy 2y agoWho said that “if you are going through hell, keep going”? I wonder if Boeing has the resources to keep going until they fix themselves.
- jmyeet 2y agoFirst, I don't understand why the two astronauts are going to be stranded for months. After the Columbia disaster, NASA adopted a policy where another Shuttle could be scrambled if a rescue mission as required. Shuttles took a lot of processing between missions. Replacing tiles, inspecting engines, that sort of thing. The report after Columbia showed that it might have been possible to scramble another Shuttle but the timeline was super tight. NASA decided not to repeat that mistake. So here we are where an 8 day mission turns into a 6 month mission because NASA (via SpaceX )doesn't have a backup? How did that happen? It's also worth noting that Crew Dragon can be configured for 6 passengers. NASA uses a 4 passenger configuration because there's simply no need for a 6 person configuration... except for now. It may actually end up being cheaper for Boeing to simply return the money (or negotiate a partial return) and throw up the white flag. Boeing is in such a terrible state. It's simply coasting on earlier successes and airlines being locked in to the 737 type rating.
- asadotzler 2y agoBecause they're not "stranded" they're just doing a slightly extended otherwise normal mission rather than a brief test mission. There's no problem with that. There is no emergency here. There's no need to scramble anything so they will ride home on February having spent 8 months up sharing a Dragon ride down with a crew that spent 6 months up. No big deal. The ISS crew appreciates the extra help around the shop right now. Butch and Suni want to be in space -- that's why they're astronauts, so they're not suffering. The only people suffering are their families and Boeing stockholders. Dragon cannot be configured with 6 seats. The 7 seat configuration was rejected by NASA because of g-forces and the vehicles are now solidly 4 seaters and you certainly can't add two more seats to the Crew Dragon that's already up there so you wait on the next one to arrive on its regular schedule minus two of its crew so Suni and Butch can use those seats. Also, they need to send up Dragon suits as the Starliner suits can't be plugged into Dragon so even if they sat on the floor of the already up there Dragon for the ride home, they still couldn't jack in and that's only going to happen if there's a genuine emergency -- which there is not. You make a lot of seemingly confident, but wrong assertions here. I suggest moderating that certainty until you know more about the subject.
- rqtwteye 2y agoAfter seeing what they are doing with their commercial planes and now Starliner I can't even imagine how screwed up the defense projects are. The NASA stuff is in the public so there is some accountability. Defense on the other hand is done in secret and everybody from Pentagon procurement people down to the defense contractor have every incentive and the ability to cover up problems.
- cwillu 2y agohttps://www.navalgazing.net/The-Problem-of-Defense-Economics https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Problem-of-Defense-Economics explains some of how it got like that.
- jfoster 2y agoI wonder if there's some price at which Boeing could buy a license to fork the current SpaceX technology. From there they could take it in different directions if they wanted, or pay some ongoing license fee for updates & training from SpaceX. Seems like it would be very beneficial for them to start with a platform that is known to work fairly well.
- NikkiA 2y agoShould never have adopted a project name from a competitor's product name; it's bad juju.