The Starship launch system is about to reach a tipping point, Gwynne Shotwell said, as it moves from an experimental rocket toward operational missions.

"We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. "We want to fly it a lot."

That lofty goal seems aspirational, not just because of the hardware challenges but also due to the ground systems (SpaceX currently has just one operational launch tower) as well as the difficulty of supplying that much liquid oxygen and methane for such a high flight rate. However, it's worth noting that SpaceX will launch Starship four times this year, twice the number of Falcon Heavy missions. An acceleration of Starship is highly likely. //

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," she said. "Now, we are not shutting down Dragon, and we are not shutting down Falcon. We'll be flying that for six to eight more years, but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times.". //

As Starlink has come online, it has significantly increased the valuation of the privately held company. A decade ago, SpaceX was valued at about $12 billion, and this grew to $36 billion in 2020. Most recently, the company was valued at about $255 billion. //

DDopson Ars Tribunus Militum
22y
2,397
Subscriptor++
daddyboomalati said:
Can someone unpack this for me? I cannot understand how a massive rocket is a better choice than the Falcon 9 for medium-weight payloads. My only thought is that it delivers multiple satellites at once. I do it all the time in Kerbal Space Program, but is this a thing in real life, or an eventual likelihood?
It's simpler than that. Starship costs less to launch than F9.

Each F9 launch expends a second stage that costs roughly $20M to fabricate. They do recover the $40M booster and the $6M fairings, but they have to fabricate a new second stage for every launch. And that second stage consumes one Merlin engine, but that's only a relatively small fraction of the stage's cost, on account of SpaceX's spectacular efficiency at manufacturing rocket engines for <$1M, literally hundreds of times cheaper than, eg, the RS-25 engines NASA buys.

The cost to fuel a Starship is on the order of a few million, possibly in the $2M or $3M ballpark (this was estimated in a prior thread), probably more when including their current fueling logistics costs, possibly a bit less at scale when they are manufacturing their own LOX and can amortize various bits of fueling infra over a consistent level of demand.

Ground logistics add additional costs (control center staff, ground crew, amortized share of launch complex, etc), but these are hard to estimate. Dividing the entire Boca Chica facility cost over ~5 test launches would produce an unfavorable number, but that's silly. The ground facilities should amortize fairly well as the launch cadence increases. And this stuff is probably mostly comparable between the two platforms.

Sticking with relatively conservative numbers, I expect their all-up internal marginal cost per Starship launch to be well under $10M per flight, much less than the cost of fabricating a new F9 second stage.

Launching Starship is thus cheaper than launching F9.

Now that's an internal cost that we may never learn with precision, and SpaceX will make a business decision about what price to charge to their customers. They may create very attractive rates for rideshares. They will likely maintain high prices for "white glove" launch contracts that include significant payload preparation and other services, especially DoD and NASA, which already typically pay more per F9 launch contract than the sticker price on the website for "just a launch". //

Delta-V required for transfer orbit between planets

KSP Visual Calculator, online tool that determines delta-v required for multiple checkpoint missions

Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket.

As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country's main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, "The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious." In the dismissal of the landing prospects of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Russian officials were not alone. Throughout the 2010s, competitors including space agencies in Europe and Japan, and US-based United Launch Alliance, all decided to develop expendable rockets.

However, by 2017, when SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, the writing was on the wall. "This is a very important step, we sincerely congratulate our colleague on this achievement," then-Roscosmos CEO Igor Komarov said at the time. He even spoke of developing reusable components, such as rocket engines capable of multiple firings.

A Russian Grasshopper
That was more than seven years ago, however, and not much has happened in Russia since then to foster the development of a reusable rocket vehicle. Yes, Roscosmos unveiled plans for the "Amur" rocket in 2020, which was intended to have a reusable first stage and methane-fueled engines and land like the Falcon 9. But its debut has slipped year for year—originally intended to fly in 2026, its first launch is now expected no earlier than 2030.

The answer is significantly dependent on how much aerodynamic pressure and heating you can tolerate, and whether it's possible to achieve high specific impulse from a rocket engine exhausting into Venusian atmosphere.

At 10km above the Venusian "reference altitude", a speed of only 46 m/s (~100 mph) puts you at a Q of 39.5kPa -- a little higher than "max Q" of most Earth-orbit launchers. If your Q limit is on that order of magnitude, it's going to take you a very long time to get out of the Searing Black Calm, which means you're going to lose a lot of delta-v to gravity -- it takes about 8 minutes going straight up before you can even think about pitching over into a gravity turn.

At least one person has estimated the delta-v to reach Venusian orbit at 27km/s, but they did not provide much detail on their methodology.

By having elfin engineers provide a magical rocket engine capable of ~240s specific impulse when exhausting into 60 atmospheres of pressure, I was able to reach orbit in my home-brewed simulation, lifting off from Maat (to save me 8km and 30 atmospheres of vertical suffering), with about 15000 m/s of delta-v. Max Q achieved was 55 kPa.

It would be physically possible, but there's no practical way to do it just with chemically-propelled rockets. The extremely high density of the atmosphere caps the top speed of the rocket until it's at high altitude, exacerbating gravity loss, so you'd need a ridiculous propellant mass ratio. (At only 100mph, the dynamic pressure at low altitude is comparable to the supersonic max-Q of a terrestrial rocket launch.)

What could conceivably work would be to use balloon ascent to get up to a high altitude "for free" and then use a chemical rocket from there. Designing and engineering something that can land, collect samples, inflate a balloon in the Venusian surface environment, and conduct an interplanetary launch from there is left as an exercise for the reader. //

@jwenting don't forget being chemically resilient to sulfuric acid at 700 K

BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—I've taken some time to process what happened on the mudflats of South Texas a little more than a week ago and relived the scene in my mind countless times.

With each replay, it's still as astonishing as it was when I saw it on October 13, standing on an elevated platform less than 4 miles away. It was surreal watching SpaceX's enormous 20-story-tall Super Heavy rocket booster plummeting through the sky before being caught back at its launch pad by giant mechanical arms. //

What's not so easy to address is how SpaceX can top this. A landing on the Moon or Mars? Sure, but realistically, those milestones are years off. There's something that'll happen before then.

Sometime soon, SpaceX will try to catch a Starship back at the launch pad at the end of an orbital flight. This will be an extraordinarily difficult feat, far exceeding the challenge of catching the Super Heavy booster.

Bloomberg calls for cancellation of the SLS rocket. In an op-ed that is critical of NASA's Artemis Program, billionaire Michael Bloomberg—the founder of Bloomberg News and a former US Presidential candidate—called for cancellation of the Space Launch System rocket. "Each launch will likely cost at least $4 billion, quadruple initial estimates," Bloomberg wrote. "This exceeds private-sector costs many times over, yet it can launch only about once every two years and—unlike SpaceX’s rockets—can’t be reused."

InvariantCapitalist Ars Centurion
1y
985
Subscriptor

Lee Vann said:
Anyone valuing SpaceX above the large Aerospace companies is a fool looking to be parted from their money. Their sales are just to low compared to the big boys. For example Lockhead Martin does ~50 billion a year in sales on a bad year. Northrop Grumman is a little behind them. How much in sales does SpaceX do in a good year? 9 Billion. A pretty good chink of change, but not up there with the big boys. More in the range of the mid tier.

Business valuations are based on expectations of future profits, not historical revenues. Starlink revenues are estimated to increase to over $6.5B this year from $4B last year, and projected to reach $20B to $30B with very high margins in a decade or so.

And that doesn't factor in the impact of switching from a partially reusable launch system (Falcon 9) that throws away a $15M first stage every launch to a fully reusable launch system like Starship lowering their cost per launch from around $30M to roughly $10M while increasing payload capacity by at least 5x. Its far improved cost structure should massively increase the demand for commercial launches. Not only will it dramatically reduce the cost of satellite launches, it enables satellite providers to build them with heavier cheaper materials and to make them far larger to offer even much improved capabilities.

It also massively reduces the costs of building space stations and potentially makes space tourism not only far cheaper but more attractive with weeks long stays for far more people. And If Starship is certified to fly humans its likely to fly more than 10,000 a year to orbit, that's a big business.

And again, likely with higher margins than a Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman. All this said, I wouldn't value SpaceX at $200B, but I'm a bottom feeding value investor. But its certainly worth a far higher price per dollar of revenues than these old space dinosaurs..

"It was a bullseye landing,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program. “The entry in particular has been darn near flawless.”

Still, he acknowledged that certain new issues had come to light, including the failure of a new thruster and the temporary loss of the guidance system.

He added it was too early to talk about whether Starliner’s next flight, scheduled for August next year, would be crewed, instead stressing NASA needed time to analyze the data they had gathered and assess what changes were required to both the design of the ship and the way it is flown.

In mid-November 2023, a disastrous SpaceX launch, which saw the explosion of not one but two rockets, offered a rare opportunity to study the effects of such phenomena on the ionosphere.
A study by Russian scientists revealed how this explosion temporarily blew open a hole in the ionosphere stretching from the Yucatan to the southeastern U.S.
Although far from the first rocket-induced disturbance in the ionosphere, this is one of the first explosive events in the ionosphere to be extensively studied. //

November 18, 2023, wasn’t a great day for the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX. While testing its stainless steel-clad Starship, designed to be the company’s chariot to Mars, the spacecraft exploded four minutes after liftoff over the skies of Boca Chica, Texas. //

This new study confirms that the ionosphere experienced a “large-amplitude total electron content depletion,” likely reinforced by a fuel exhaust impact of the Super Heavy rocket engine, which also exploded a little more than a minute earlier at lower altitude once it separated from the Starship. The research team collected this data from 2,500 ground stations scattered across North America and the Caribbean and found that the hole extended largely from Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and the southeastern U.S., though the exact size of the hole is unknown. //

scientists report that this Starship-induced ion hole caused by “catastrophic phenomena” closed up after 30 or 40 minutes. But these kinds of interactions are still poorly understood, and that’s concerning considering how central the ionosphere is to global technologies—not to mention human health.

rocket bodies, satellites, space debris in earth orbit

Q: What is the highest apogee of a satellite in Earth orbit they need to avoid? Ignore any satellites in Solar or lunar orbit.

A: There are over a hundred satellites in Molniya orbit, a few tens in Tundra orbit and a handful in really high earth orbits. The first two of those go above geostationary orbit; there are examples of the last with perigee of at least 375,000km. //

James Webb Space Telescope, at the Earth-Sun L2 point, is roundly a million miles from Earth, but still gravitationally bound to the Earth-Moon system.

Other than that, there are very few if any permanent satellites beyond the "graveyard orbits" used to park expired geostationary satellites. These are typically only a few hundred kilometers higher than geosynchronous, however, so roundly if they're well beyond the 24 hour orbital period, they'd be well clear of anything we put up intentionally and left there. //

Then there is stuff, mostly debris, that is more critical, because by nature those pieces are very fast, the orbit is not stable, so it changes a little every round and the kinetic energy would be able to penetrate any hull that is not specifically designed to withstand such impacts. For example, this debris of an Iridium satellite - at the time of writing at altitude ~366,000km and counting, spiralling outwards at 1km/s (the map does not mention a size or weight though. But it is big enough to be trackable obviously).

It's unlikely Boeing can fly all six of its Starliner missions before retirement of the ISS in 2030. //

Ten years ago next month, NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency's most experienced contractors, won the lion's share of government money available to end the agency's sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete the development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

A decade later, the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft's first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule on June 5, will instead return to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn't confident enough in Boeing's spacecraft after it suffered multiple thruster failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS. //

On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn't worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX. //

So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? "I think we’re looking at the data, and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator and the agency's most senior civil servant. "It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner."

The people at the top of NASA's decision-making tree have either flown in space before or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of Space Shuttle Columbia's left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle's fuel tank during launch. //

Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, the decision was relatively straightforward. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA's space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.

However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. //

SpaceX, which NASA has tapped to rescue the Starliner crew, has now launched eight operational long-duration crew missions to the International Space Station to date, plus an initial piloted test flight of the Dragon spacecraft in 2020 and several more fully private human spaceflight missions. SpaceX has finished all of its work in its initial commercial crew contract with NASA and is now working off of an extended contract to carry the program through 2030, the planned retirement date for the ISS. //

Right now, the prime route is through SpaceX. NASA continues to fly one astronaut on each Russian Soyuz spacecraft in exchange for a seat for a Russian cosmonaut on each SpaceX crew mission. //

Assuming the investigation doesn't uncover any additional problems and NASA and Boeing return Starliner to flight with astronauts in 2026, there will not be enough time left in the space station's remaining life—as it stands today—for Starliner to fly all six of its contracted missions at a rate of one per year. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where NASA elects to fly astronauts to the space station exclusively on Starliner, given SpaceX's track record of success and the fact that NASA is already paying SpaceX for crew missions through the end of this decade.

Notably, NASA has only given Boeing the "Authority To Proceed" for three of the six potential operational Starliner missions. This milestone, known as ATP, is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has previously said it awards these task orders about two to three years prior to a mission's launch.

The commercial crew contracts are structured as Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreements, where NASA can order individual missions from SpaceX and Boeing as needed. If SpaceX keeps performing well and the space station is actually decommissioned in 2030, it may turn out that NASA officials decide they just don't need more than three operational flights of Starliner. //

Lone Striker Smack-Fu Master, in training
7y
62

accdc said:
Thank you Stephen, and Eric, for your fantastic coverage of this issue.

Here’s what I (as a layman with little technical expertise) don’t get:

How does SpaceX make it look so easy, and Boeing make it look so, well, ridiculous?

SpaceX designs, manufactures and integrates most components themselves. In Boeing's case, the thruster manufacturer is Aerojet. In order to make changes or redesign the components, there is a huge bureaucratic barrier in place. They have to jump through extraordinary hoops, not only engineers but also procurement, legal, and any number of departments. In SpaceX's case, it's a walk down the corridor to talk to engineers to discuss the problem and design the fix.

Boeing is also in the dark ages in terms of software development (my field.) SpaceX has a more Silicon Valley/Agile software design methodology where you make many, faster, smaller changes and test them extensively with small unit tests all the way through to hardware-in-the-middle testing to ensure things work as intended. Every tiny change gets rigorously tested to ensure there are no defects or regressions. Boeing's ancient software development process was one of the primary factors in their first Orbital Flight Test failure where they nearly lost the vehicle twice due to software bugs with the mission clock and reentry procedures.

Boeing relies partially on paperwork to validate their spacecraft (whether it's contracts with sub-contractors or studies in place of actual testing) and they've lost the engineers and the engineering culture from the early spaceflight era. //

HiWayne! Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
50
Ten years they’ve been tinkering with Starliner. That’s crazy. The first crewed Mercury flight and Apollo 15 spanned ten years.
Yeah I know, I know. NASA had an insane budget back then, but damn. Boeing had the benefit of half a century of spaceflight experience and they’re struggling this much to get to LEO. //

Dachshund Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
4y
110

accdc said:
Thank you Stephen, and Eric, for your fantastic coverage of this issue.

Here’s what I (as a layman with little technical expertise) don’t get:

How does SpaceX make it look so easy, and Boeing make it look so, well, ridiculous?

Having worked for or with these companies as an engineer, the most concise explanation I have is culture.

Boeings culture is not technically focused, nor mission focused. Boeings culture is Boeing focused with a particular emphasis on shareholders. The overwhelming majority of managers I’ve worked with at Boeing view engineers as a plug and play commodity and are woefully ignorant of the general subject matter they manage. Many I know at Boeing have an exceptionally difficult time taking responsibility for mistakes that Boeing makes. Whether it’s commercial planes or crew capsules, it’s somebody else’s fault and Boeing knew best. Hubris is rampant across Boeing. What’s fascinating there is that there isn’t a damn thing worth being proud of in recent years, but the cognitive dissonance remains strong.

SpaceX culture is mission focused. Their managers tend to understand what it is they are managing. Their workforce is rather young, however, they test things and are willing to publicly fail in a way that Boeing and others will not stomach. When SpaceX does fail, they tend to take full responsibility, learn from the issue and solve the problem.

SpaceX is more or less doing what NACA and subsequently NASA did in their infancy. It’s nothing new, but it’s a major difference as compared to what NASA and its ecosystem have evolved to since those early years. //

Malmesbury Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
3m
341

TLStetler said:
A big part of the problem is Boeing put too many thrusters in too small a space and operated them at a duty cycle which caused everything to overheat. Said overheating caused vapor lock in the propellant lines, and Teflon seals to soften and swell.

On the other hand, if you've seen images of Dragon with the aeroshell off the thrusters are distributed spatially, not crowded together. Plumbing and control lines are not near the throats of said thrusters.

This is not even rocket science, any decent Hot Rodder knows not to place propellant/fuel lines etc. in a "hot box."

The problems are inherent in the development methods and company structures.

SpaceX insources - mostly because of cost, but also control. There are, deliberately, few barriers between the engineers working on various parts of the system.

The Boeing/Aerojet relationship is a key counter example - because of a arguments over money they started treating each other as the enemy.

Boeing is attempting to design to perfection, then test. If anything goes wrong at the test stage, they are actually in interactive hardware development. Without the hardware, or low cost basis to do the large number of physical tests required. SpaceX assumed they are in iterative development from the start.

During the initial hours of the spaceflight, the crew will seek to fly in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching an altitude as high as 1,400 km (870 miles) above the planet's surface. This will be the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown by humans and the farthest any person has flown from Earth since the Apollo Moon landings more than half a century ago. This will expose the crew to a not insignificant amount of radiation, and they will collect biological data to assess harms. //

Isaacman's interest in performing the first private spacewalk accelerated, by years, SpaceX's development of these spacesuits. This really is just the first generation of the suit, and SpaceX is likely to continue iterating toward a spacesuit that has its own portable life support system (PLSS). This is the "backpack" on a traditional spacesuit that allows NASA astronauts to perform spacewalks untethered to the International Space Station.

The general idea is that, as the Starship vehicle makes the surface of the Moon and eventually Mars more accessible to more people, future generations of these lower-cost spacesuits will enable exploration and settlement. That journey, in some sense, begins with this mission's brief spacewalks, with Isaacman and Gillis tethered to the Dragon vehicle for life support. //

This is the first of three "Polaris" missions that Isaacman is scheduled to fly with SpaceX. The plan for the second Polaris mission, also to fly on a Dragon spacecraft, has yet to be determined. But it may well employ a second-generation spacesuit based on learnings from this spaceflight. The third flight, unlikely to occur before at least 2030, will be an orbital launch aboard the company's Starship vehicle—making Isaacman and his crew the first to fly on that rocket.

ridley
So to be able to use their spacesuits they need to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Best give Mr Lovell a call. //

Avoiding standard docking and space suit adapters seems like a good way of wasting money and time
The thing that most surprises me about this whole mess is why NASA would ever consider that having a different design of docking adapter and space suit for each type of American vehicle that is to dock with the ISS was a good idea..

That the Soviet G2S vehicles would use different docking adapters and space suit connectors is expected: the two parts of the original ISS design were always intended to use differing docking ports and space suit connectors from the get-go.

However, it beggars belief that NASA would not have specfied a common set of docking adapters for all American spacecraft as well as common space suit interface(s), if only to save costs and re-implementation effort by basing these interfaces on than the well-tested Shuttle docking and space suit connectors. AFAIK those never caused problems throughout their useful life. //

Re: Avoiding standard space suit adapters seems like a good way of wasting money and time

No, giving money to SpaceX was seen as a good way of wasting money and time.

REMEMBER: when this all started, Boeing was the shoo-in, and that goofy SpaceX startup was the complete waste of time and money.

Nobody expected SpaceX to actually ever reach Station.

It never entered anyone's mind that SpaceX would eventually have to rescue a Boeing crew.

The American docking adapters ARE standard.

https://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/meet-the-international-docking-adapter/

American spacecraft, INCLUDING Shuttle, either dock to this, or are berthed by the robot arm to a standard pressure door, which allows larger cargo. //

Re: other good ways of wasting money and time
To ensure SLS block 1 would launch by 2016 congress decided to use an upper stage (Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) based on Centaur which has been flying since the 60s. The wimpy ICPS massively restricts SLS capabilities so a new Exploration Upper Stage was ordered for SLS block 1B. SLS is assembled on a mobile launch platform in the vertical assembly building and the rocket and platform are carried out together to the launch site by the crawler/transporter. The MLP includes a tower to fill the core stage and upper stage with propellants. The solid rocket boosters have grown an extra segment each since the space shuttle so the combined mass of SLS and MLP are now sufficient damage the crawler transporter's tracks and they path the travel to the launch site. EUS is longer than ICPS so the propellant connections are at a different height. A whole new MLP is required otherwise SLS block 1B would be delayed because modifications to MLP1 would not be able to start until after Artemis III.

Clearly this situation is untenable. What if MLP2 was completed before EUS? Boeing would look bad for delaying Artemis IV. The solution was simple: do not decide what height the propellant connections will be at until the last possible minute. Bechtel cannot start design of MLP2 without that. Moving the connections also moves the fans that blow hydrogen leaks away before the concentration gets big enough for an explosion. Designing the MLP for a choice of connection heights is also tricky. The platform must be optimized for mass so it does not go much further over the limits of the crawler transporter.

If Boeing and SpaceX had to agree on a flight suit connector US astronauts would now have a choice of rides to the ISS: Soyuz or Shenzou.

Believe it or not there is a worse solution. NASA could decide the shape of the flight suit connectors. Congress would then have an opportunity to help like they did with SLS. Giving Boeing and SpaceX the freedom to work independently of congress (and each other) saves a huge amount of time and money. It also means a flight suit design issue does not ground both crew transport systems at the same time.

After nearly every flight, the upper stage of this rocket breaks apart in orbit. //

A new debris field of nearly 1,000 objects would be a significant addition to the approximately 46,000 objects Space Command tracks in Earth orbit. According to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who monitors global launch and spaceflight activity, this would rank in the top five of all debris-generation events since the dawn of the Space Age.

The Thousand Sails constellation aims to provide global internet access. It is one of two planned Chinese systems to challenge U.S. projects including Starlink. Thousand Sails is also intended to secure finite orbital slots and frequencies, and provide national internet coverage and data security. //

The Long March 6A rocket used for Tuesday’s launch combines liquid propellant core stages with solid rocket boosters. The launcher can carry 4,500 kg to a 700-km sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket’s upper stage appears to have suffered debris issues in orbit. //

BadSuperblock Ars Praefectus
15y
3,125

rbtr4bp said:
I think there is an argument that SpaceX, as a new and agile company with something to prove, is going to do things better. People who are willing to accept more risk are attracted to the new "startup" and willing to work harder for the same or less money because of the adventure and excitement.
...

No, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this incompetence was a consequence of "maturing." It is not a foregone conclusion. For one thing, what is your definition of "mature"? We think of technology companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Intel to be "mature" because they are now going on 40 years old. Well, since Boeing was founded in 1916, by the time they were 50 years old in 1966, Boeing was taking some of the biggest, most rewarding, and most admired engineering risks and innovations of their entire history: Projects like components for the Apollo moon program, and the absolutely revolutionary and widely loved 747 airliner. This company, half a century old, was creating these exciting, "startup" quality projects. At that time, they were more "mature" than the companies we now call mature, but they had not lost their innovative spirit, engineering discipline, and quality control.

It is generally agreed that the root cause of the Boeing malaise was not the age of the company, but the decision of one CEO and board to allow McDonnell Douglas management to take over Boeing, instituting the changes that poisoned the company. In other words, it was not a rot from within, but a culture change imposed by outsiders.

"Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods." //

Boeing announced another financial charge Wednesday for its troubled Starliner commercial crew program, bringing the company's total losses on Starliner to $1.6 billion. //

These losses have generally been caused by schedule delays and additional work to solve problems on Starliner. When NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft a decade ago, the aerospace contractor projected the capsule would be ready to fly astronauts by the end of 2017.

It turns out the Crew Flight Test didn't launch until June 5, 2024. //

When NASA selected Boeing and SpaceX to develop the Starliner and Crew Dragon spacecraft for astronaut missions, the agency signed fixed-price agreements with each contractor. These fixed-price contracts mean the contractors, not the government, are responsible for paying for cost overruns. //

It's instructive to compare these costs with those of SpaceX's Crew Dragon program, which started flying astronauts in 2020. All of NASA's contracts with SpaceX for a similar scope of work on the Crew Dragon program totaled more than $3.1 billion, but any expenses paid by SpaceX are unknown because it is a privately held company.

SpaceX has completed all six of its original crew flights for NASA, while Boeing is at least a year away from starting operational service with Starliner. In light of Boeing's delays, NASA extended SpaceX's commercial crew contract to cover eight additional round-trip flights to the space station through the end of the 2020s. //

cyberfunk Ars Scholae Palatinae
12y
824
Blaming fixed price contracts is rich. They're basically admitting incompetence by blaming the cost structure they agreed to.. either because they agreed to it, or because they can't properly estimate cost and deliver quality product on budget. Either way they look like idiots. I'm glad they're holding the bag this time and not the taxpayer. //

BigFire Ars Scholae Palatinae
3y
985
SpaceX will not bid on Cost Plus contracts because the company isn't setup with the kind of extra layers of auditing to justifying everything that will trigger the cost overrun payments. Frankly Boeing Space isn't setup to do anything other than Cost Plus (witness ISS and SLS center core). Nevermind the same ballpark, they're not even playing the same sports, quoting Jules Winnfield from Pulp fiction. //

Dachshund Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
99
You could see this shift happening within Boeing a little over two decades ago. I had the privilege of learning from some of the last grey beards whose work had given Boeing their stellar reputation before they retired. Those grey beards were worn thin and got zero respect from the hot shot, tassel loafer MBAs hustling them to do things “better, faster, cheaper”.

Internally we knew it was all going to hell, we just weren’t sure when the public would see it for themselves. I thank the space exploration Gods for SpaceX - if it weren’t for them Boeing and every other crook company could keep playing the “space is hard” card and the cost plus buffet open. //

Transmission Integrity Seniorius Lurkius
5y
8
Subscriptor

RickVS said:
The bean counters deserve this. If instead of shareholder value they had focused on top-notch engineering, they probably would have already flown crew to the ISS at least a couple of times.

And as a result it would probably have been cheaper/profitable. //