5 ms·

NASA delays next flight of Boeing's alternative to SpaceX Dragon

57 points by bookmtn 1y ago

DocTomoe 1y ago
Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now. But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either. I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.
- cdbattags 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - timewizard 1y ago
    You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program. Now we have two choices for some reason. I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
    - jonplackett 1y ago
      And corruption!
    - tekla 1y ago
      > Now we have two choices for some reason. Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
      - lupusreal 1y ago
        > we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore. We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected. At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless. And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets. (Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)
cbanek 1y ago
"Musk, who has been engaged in a high-profile feud with US President Donald Trump, on Thursday threatened to decommission the Dragon before later saying the spacecraft would stay in operation." Interesting timing.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  he got himself on gov watch list after that tweet for sure
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    Yeah I heard they're gonna start live-tracking his private jet flights
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  He was never going to decommission Dragon. That was just playground petulance. There's nothing Putin enjoys more than watching two senior underlings fighting like rats in a sack. The US space and science programmes are useful collateral damage in this.
- Propelloni 1y ago
  I'm usually not one to defend Elmo, but it was a response to P47 threatening to defund SpaceX. It's like watching children. Poor USA, poor us.
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    Wasn't it Musk that was calling for a smaller and leaner government?
    - wtcactus 1y ago
      DragonX is the smaller and leaner government.
      - 1y ago
madaxe_again 1y ago
They say “the only US alternative”, which is true, but it’s not the only alternative - nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same. Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches. Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time. Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities. Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission. China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
  - lupusreal 1y ago
    Congress has forbidden NASA to cooperate with China for many years. It's been law since 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)
    - imtringued 1y ago
      Correct. The US paid for the Soyuz flights that they owed Russian astronauts, because they had no means of bringing them to the ISS.
vaxman 1y ago
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
- dmos62 1y ago
  What would be the goal?
- xoa 1y ago
  >It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it. The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all. People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
nbittich 1y ago
when they'll finally manage to put it to orbit and come back without a dramatic issue, the space station will already be decommissioned, sad for Boeing

57 points by bookmtn 1y ago

Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now. But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either. I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.

cdbattags 1y ago
[flagged]
- timewizard 1y ago
  You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program. Now we have two choices for some reason. I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
  - jonplackett 1y ago
    And corruption!
  - tekla 1y ago
    > Now we have two choices for some reason. Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
    - lupusreal 1y ago
      > we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore. We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected. At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless. And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets. (Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)

cbanek 1y ago

"Musk, who has been engaged in a high-profile feud with US President Donald Trump, on Thursday threatened to decommission the Dragon before later saying the spacecraft would stay in operation." Interesting timing.

tonyhart7 1y ago
he got himself on gov watch list after that tweet for sure
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Yeah I heard they're gonna start live-tracking his private jet flights
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
He was never going to decommission Dragon. That was just playground petulance. There's nothing Putin enjoys more than watching two senior underlings fighting like rats in a sack. The US space and science programmes are useful collateral damage in this.
Propelloni 1y ago
I'm usually not one to defend Elmo, but it was a response to P47 threatening to defund SpaceX. It's like watching children. Poor USA, poor us.
- Hamuko 1y ago
  Wasn't it Musk that was calling for a smaller and leaner government?
  - wtcactus 1y ago
    DragonX is the smaller and leaner government.
    - 1y ago

madaxe_again 1y ago

They say “the only US alternative”, which is true, but it’s not the only alternative - nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same. Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches. Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time. Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities. Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.

sigmoid10 1y ago
NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission. China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  Congress has forbidden NASA to cooperate with China for many years. It's been law since 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)
  - imtringued 1y ago
    Correct. The US paid for the Soyuz flights that they owed Russian astronauts, because they had no means of bringing them to the ISS.

vaxman 1y ago

It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.

dmos62 1y ago
What would be the goal?
xoa 1y ago
>It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it. The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all. People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.

nbittich 1y ago

when they'll finally manage to put it to orbit and come back without a dramatic issue, the space station will already be decommissioned, sad for Boeing