It's now 4 1/2 years since Starliner's nearly-disastrous first (uncrewed) test flight, 4 years since SpaceX's successful crewed test flight, and 2 years since Starliner's second (uncrewed) test flight.
At what point does NASA need to pull the plug on Starliner, and start looking for second-source Earth-LEO passenger service from companies which can actually do the d*mned job?
Commercial Crew is fixed-price contracts, whereas cost-plus contracts has been the norm in the US aerospace industry. Boeing is the one bleeding money here.
Like I said, it doesn't cost them much. It's not zero cost - people have to talk to Boeing, yell at them when things are broken, review fixes and proposals, etc.
If NASA's real goal is to have a reliable second-source provider, and their endless futzing around with Boeing is incompatible with that (due to limited NASA staffing, politics, or whatever) - then keeping Boeing's feet to the fire does carry high costs for NASA.
I suspect they think of it like a lottery ticket - there's a small but slim chance that Boeing eventually spends enough billions fixing it that it successfully flies. All NASA has to do is staff enough folks to go "nope fix that too"; the lion's share of the costs are Boeing's.
> The Crew Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is no longer targeting Saturday, May 25. We're awaiting official word from NASA and Boeing on the next possible launch date and for more information regarding the path forward on the helium leak.
What happened to good or even okay spacecraft design? A good design would mean this is easy to troubleshoot and would not impact the launch date because it could be fixed well ahead of time. How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today? It was a scrappier time, to say the least.
>How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years
The US is doing great over at SpaceX. It's just Boeing who are kind of crap these days.
Quite a lot is explained if you listen to Musk on the founding of SpaceX around 5:20 where he is talking about a small team of top engineers and not much management. Boeing is I think not like that https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240
This. COTS was critical. Space Act Agreements are how things get done and optimizing for fixed priced, milestone based SAAs has been great for all "routine" things that NASA doesn't have to do extensive novel R&D to make happen, things like transportation, which is all space launch is these days.
SpaceX lives because of COTS and that's great. But that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005. It's commodity infrastructure and SpaceX, unlike Boeing and others, has a workable commodity style approach so they're eating everyone's lunch. Then SpaceX developed reusability because of its Mars ambitions and re-usable Falcon sealed the deal on industry dominance. No one can touch SpaceX's ~$20M F9 launch cost so SpaceX gobbles up any contracts that aren't locked down by law.
> that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005
It wasn’t boring so much as gated. If anything, nobody recognised it had become a commodity outside a couple crazy dudes in Hawthorne and West Texas. The majors still talked about it like they were doing dark magic.
I was just reading an HN submission yesterday saying the risks for astronauts today are actually worse than what they faced in the Apollo missions 50 years ago.
Unproven vehicles with a human onboard from launch #1 -- hello SLS. Sounds like a real gas.
NASA has gotten a lot better at estimating risk, especially after two Shuttle explosions taught them the hard way that they were really bad at it.
Applying those methods to Apollo shows us just how lucky we are that we didn't lose any of them.
NASA claims that their risk of catastrophe on Artemis 2 is 1 in 400. They'd have to be wrong by a couple orders of magnitude to be comparable to the Apollo missions. I might not trust their 1 in 400 number, but I don't think they're off by 2 orders of magnitude.
The endless Starliner delays are another sign of this. They could launch Starliner with the helium leak and everything would probably be fine. But they're not. They've lost astronauts to "go fever" and have instituted a much more risk averse culture.
SLS is still the king in that respect, IMO. Starliner is only going to waste a couple of billion dollars. If it never flies Boeing will only get paid for half the project, and if it does fly it'll be overpriced but still do something useful.
OTOH, SLS + Orion are likely going to waste an astounding $100B dollars. And not deliver much useful -- Starship is going to the moon from Earth anyways, why not just put the astronauts on Starship to begin with instead of delivering them with SLS + Orion?
This one ain't a jobs program; Boeing has already taken significant losses and continues to do so. The Commercial Cargo and Crew missions were unusual in being fixed cost contracts; they're already almost $2B in the hole. https://spacenews.com/boeing-records-more-losses-from-starli...
At what point does NASA need to pull the plug on Starliner, and start looking for second-source Earth-LEO passenger service from companies which can actually do the d*mned job?