8 ms·

It is unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.
- dchichkov 2y ago
  As long as there's competition, it is fine. Boeing fits at least that role easily. Plus, they've built the vehicle with no drama and without purchasing Twitter in the middle. This is worth something. We see similar situation in automotive. Other companies do allow to keep Tesla in check, so there's less opportunity to force "Cybertrucks" onto the market as the only option.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Boeing fits at least that role No, they don’t. Starliner is a paper competitor. The money NASA sends it ensure SpaceX maintains a practical monopoly. Boeing is the “competitor” everyone wishes for. Sucking up the oxygen in the room a real competitor might need while doing absolutely nothing to contest your market share. > they've built the vehicle with no drama Late to launch, billions over budget and strands its astronauts but has a CEO you can’t remember because their planes kept falling apart is a weird way to spell “no drama.”
    - dotnet00 2y ago
      One of the benefits of the commercial crew program was supposed to be that NASA would just be one customer of many, thus justifying why the company takes on the risk of making a fixed price bid. Starliner does not even attempt to compete on the commercial market, it has a fixed number of Atlas V's stored away for the NASA contract, and then someone will have to cough up money to try to put it on another rocket. So, they aren't even in the market, let alone doing anything to even appear to compete.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The only positive thing I can say about his purchase of Twitter was that it finally stopped me wasting time on the site. Despite Musk's… what, breakdown? Radicalisation? Temper tantrums? Whatever that is, SpaceX is still astoundingly fast at both launching stuff to orbit and also making new and better rockets than almost everyone else on the planet combined. I'd like to see the money that was given to Boeing, instead given to another space startup that might do something interesting. Spin-launch, perhaps.
    - Exoristos 2y ago
      You can just say "he has a few different opinions than my peer group" and leave it at that. Heck, you yourself can even form your own opinions -- it's fine -- don't look so aghast.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Different opinions is not the problem. My own opinions differ plenty from my peers. Even that the opinions are outside my Overton Window isn't itself a problem, because (as with most of my nationality) that window excludes the 2nd Amendment and yet I can be here on this American website. Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like defections in the IPD sense.
      - thinkcontext 2y ago
        I put spreading conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines (this week), plots by Jews, vaccines caused Lebron James' son to pass out, Paul Pelosi's attacker was actually his gay lover, etc in a different category than "he has a few different opinions than my peer group". Something has gone terribly wrong.
        smolder 2y ago
        I don't think he's actually as dumb as that, he is just playing the same counter-intelligence game as other people on the right, because telling the truth isn't as advantageous for them. People buying into that stuff are morons, but useful to the republican party all the same.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
    >Boeing [...] >no drama Come again?
- usefulcat 2y ago
  Intends, and (more importantly) is able to.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  Starliner works. It had a minor issue that turned out not to be so serious. It just happens to obscenely expensive. There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done. Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?
  - boxed 2y ago
    The shuttle worked. It had many successful flights. Then it killed 7 astronauts. Then it worked again they said. Then 7 more died. > Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures? Well that's just a straight up lie.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      People forget that on Apollo 13s return there was a legitimate concern that the explosion had damaged the heat shield and the fear was it would fail and the craft would melt and break up entirely during deorbit. Due to their nature they're sensitive and easy to compromise. Which is also why NASA knew from day 1 that icing was going to be a huge issue on the shuttle. They were retrofitting the vehicle, the launch platform and even the software to reduce heat shield risks very early on. Some of their earliest flights included EVA experiments where the astronauts translated themselves to the thermal tiles, did inspections, and even did mock repairs to test the feasibility of the idea and of the quality of the adhesives in near total vacuum. After the final accident they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm, swung "underneath" the shuttle, and used to take a comprehensive survey of the thermal management system immediately on orbit. In any case, point is, human rated space flight will always require this level of attention to detail and ongoing effort to derisk every possible aspect of every mission performed. NASA management did an outright terrible job at this. From incentivizing the wrong behavior, falling in love with paper targets, and completely failing to audit their own internal risk estimations for errors.
- tagami 2y ago
  New Glenn, eventually.
- K0balt 2y ago
  Boeing is clearly a company in the death spiral stage of institutional decline. It happens to most institutions, unfortunately, and it will probably happen to spacex one day. That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled. Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    Boeing is just bizarre to me. The aviation industry is seeing massive growth in new Asian markets, their only competition has a massive backlog and STILL Boeing is sinking. God knows if they could survive an actual recession.
    - K0balt 2y ago
      I think Boeing is an object lesson in what happens when you have an MBA without an engineering background run a company whose product is cutting edge engineering. You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center. So, You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc. All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering. So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects. At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.
      - kranke155 2y ago
zarzavat 2y ago
There's completion but it will come from China. Nobody else is paying attention.
sixQuarks 2y ago
SpaceX hasn’t had much competition for years now and they just pulled off catching the largest booster in history like a pair of chopsticks. I don’t think competition is what is motivating them.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Musk is getting older. I bet his motivation is to fulfill the mission of humanity on Mars before he passes.
  - Intermernet 2y ago
    Who can tell? Musk has gone full Kanye at this point. He still has intelligence, but years of people telling him he's the most talented person on the earth have led to a downward spiral of egomania and lack of self awareness. I don't think anyone can guess his motivations at this point.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Musk made his goals for SpaceX well known from the beginning, has for decades maintained that was his goals and his actions with SpaceX are all consistent with those goals. What more could you want? > downward spiral Oh come on.
- bonestamp2 2y ago
  Exactly. They're motivated by reducing dollars per kg of payload. They have their own agenda for a Mars mission, and they'll build a business taking third party gigs to fund their long term mission to get people to Mars.
yarg 2y ago
[flagged]
atoav 2y ago
If there is no competition to a corp, consider the option of nationalizing it. Suddenly the prospect of being without competition will look far less desireable to them.
- charrondev 2y ago
  I guess that would make sense if the company without competition had a stranglehold on the industry and was taking part in anticompetitive behaviour to build a moat around themselves but as far as I know Space X isn’t doing this? What would you expect them to do differently under this proposed scenario?
Yeul 2y ago
I think the Chinese already fill that role. We all know why America (and the Chinese) want to go to Mars and it ain't for science.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  Perhaps I'm the only one who doesn't know. Care to enlighten me?
  - Yeul 2y ago
    The flag. Space has and still is just for propaganda. Anything else is just nerd dreams.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Propaganda communicating the eventual heat death of the planet.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    It’s on the secret passport page.
jonplackett 2y ago
Long term probably yes. Once it becomes a monopoly (I guess it already is really) but if it is one for too long it will get just as sloppy as Boeing. Remember Boeing used to actually be good. I doubt Boeing could ever be that competition though.

> unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.

dchichkov 2y ago
As long as there's competition, it is fine. Boeing fits at least that role easily. Plus, they've built the vehicle with no drama and without purchasing Twitter in the middle. This is worth something. We see similar situation in automotive. Other companies do allow to keep Tesla in check, so there's less opportunity to force "Cybertrucks" onto the market as the only option.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Boeing fits at least that role No, they don’t. Starliner is a paper competitor. The money NASA sends it ensure SpaceX maintains a practical monopoly. Boeing is the “competitor” everyone wishes for. Sucking up the oxygen in the room a real competitor might need while doing absolutely nothing to contest your market share. > they've built the vehicle with no drama Late to launch, billions over budget and strands its astronauts but has a CEO you can’t remember because their planes kept falling apart is a weird way to spell “no drama.”
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    One of the benefits of the commercial crew program was supposed to be that NASA would just be one customer of many, thus justifying why the company takes on the risk of making a fixed price bid. Starliner does not even attempt to compete on the commercial market, it has a fixed number of Atlas V's stored away for the NASA contract, and then someone will have to cough up money to try to put it on another rocket. So, they aren't even in the market, let alone doing anything to even appear to compete.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The only positive thing I can say about his purchase of Twitter was that it finally stopped me wasting time on the site. Despite Musk's… what, breakdown? Radicalisation? Temper tantrums? Whatever that is, SpaceX is still astoundingly fast at both launching stuff to orbit and also making new and better rockets than almost everyone else on the planet combined. I'd like to see the money that was given to Boeing, instead given to another space startup that might do something interesting. Spin-launch, perhaps.
  - Exoristos 2y ago
    You can just say "he has a few different opinions than my peer group" and leave it at that. Heck, you yourself can even form your own opinions -- it's fine -- don't look so aghast.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Different opinions is not the problem. My own opinions differ plenty from my peers. Even that the opinions are outside my Overton Window isn't itself a problem, because (as with most of my nationality) that window excludes the 2nd Amendment and yet I can be here on this American website. Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like defections in the IPD sense.
    - thinkcontext 2y ago
      I put spreading conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines (this week), plots by Jews, vaccines caused Lebron James' son to pass out, Paul Pelosi's attacker was actually his gay lover, etc in a different category than "he has a few different opinions than my peer group". Something has gone terribly wrong.
      - smolder 2y ago
        I don't think he's actually as dumb as that, he is just playing the same counter-intelligence game as other people on the right, because telling the truth isn't as advantageous for them. People buying into that stuff are morons, but useful to the republican party all the same.
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
  >Boeing [...] >no drama Come again?
usefulcat 2y ago
Intends, and (more importantly) is able to.
gamblor956 2y ago
Starliner works. It had a minor issue that turned out not to be so serious. It just happens to obscenely expensive. There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done. Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?
- boxed 2y ago
  The shuttle worked. It had many successful flights. Then it killed 7 astronauts. Then it worked again they said. Then 7 more died. > Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures? Well that's just a straight up lie.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    People forget that on Apollo 13s return there was a legitimate concern that the explosion had damaged the heat shield and the fear was it would fail and the craft would melt and break up entirely during deorbit. Due to their nature they're sensitive and easy to compromise. Which is also why NASA knew from day 1 that icing was going to be a huge issue on the shuttle. They were retrofitting the vehicle, the launch platform and even the software to reduce heat shield risks very early on. Some of their earliest flights included EVA experiments where the astronauts translated themselves to the thermal tiles, did inspections, and even did mock repairs to test the feasibility of the idea and of the quality of the adhesives in near total vacuum. After the final accident they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm, swung "underneath" the shuttle, and used to take a comprehensive survey of the thermal management system immediately on orbit. In any case, point is, human rated space flight will always require this level of attention to detail and ongoing effort to derisk every possible aspect of every mission performed. NASA management did an outright terrible job at this. From incentivizing the wrong behavior, falling in love with paper targets, and completely failing to audit their own internal risk estimations for errors.
tagami 2y ago
New Glenn, eventually.
K0balt 2y ago
Boeing is clearly a company in the death spiral stage of institutional decline. It happens to most institutions, unfortunately, and it will probably happen to spacex one day. That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled. Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.
- Yeul 2y ago
  Boeing is just bizarre to me. The aviation industry is seeing massive growth in new Asian markets, their only competition has a massive backlog and STILL Boeing is sinking. God knows if they could survive an actual recession.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    I think Boeing is an object lesson in what happens when you have an MBA without an engineering background run a company whose product is cutting edge engineering. You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center. So, You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc. All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering. So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects. At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.
    - kranke155 2y ago

zarzavat 2y ago

There's completion but it will come from China. Nobody else is paying attention.

sixQuarks 2y ago

SpaceX hasn’t had much competition for years now and they just pulled off catching the largest booster in history like a pair of chopsticks. I don’t think competition is what is motivating them.

WalterBright 2y ago
Musk is getting older. I bet his motivation is to fulfill the mission of humanity on Mars before he passes.
- Intermernet 2y ago
  Who can tell? Musk has gone full Kanye at this point. He still has intelligence, but years of people telling him he's the most talented person on the earth have led to a downward spiral of egomania and lack of self awareness. I don't think anyone can guess his motivations at this point.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Musk made his goals for SpaceX well known from the beginning, has for decades maintained that was his goals and his actions with SpaceX are all consistent with those goals. What more could you want? > downward spiral Oh come on.
bonestamp2 2y ago
Exactly. They're motivated by reducing dollars per kg of payload. They have their own agenda for a Mars mission, and they'll build a business taking third party gigs to fund their long term mission to get people to Mars.

yarg 2y ago

[flagged]

atoav 2y ago

If there is no competition to a corp, consider the option of nationalizing it. Suddenly the prospect of being without competition will look far less desireable to them.

charrondev 2y ago
I guess that would make sense if the company without competition had a stranglehold on the industry and was taking part in anticompetitive behaviour to build a moat around themselves but as far as I know Space X isn’t doing this? What would you expect them to do differently under this proposed scenario?

Yeul 2y ago

I think the Chinese already fill that role. We all know why America (and the Chinese) want to go to Mars and it ain't for science.

ninalanyon 2y ago
Perhaps I'm the only one who doesn't know. Care to enlighten me?
- Yeul 2y ago
  The flag. Space has and still is just for propaganda. Anything else is just nerd dreams.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Propaganda communicating the eventual heat death of the planet.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  It’s on the secret passport page.

jonplackett 2y ago

Long term probably yes. Once it becomes a monopoly (I guess it already is really) but if it is one for too long it will get just as sloppy as Boeing. Remember Boeing used to actually be good. I doubt Boeing could ever be that competition though.