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Boeing's failed Starliner mission strains 'reliability' pitch:
Boeing Co’s (BA.N) stunted Friday debut of its astronaut capsule threatens to dent the U.S. aerospace incumbent’s self-declared competitive advantage of mission reliability against the price and innovation strengths of “new space” players like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, has anchored its attempt to repel space visionaries like Musk and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos partly on its mission safety record built up over decades of space travel.
While SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to send their own crewed missions to space for the first time, Boeing or Boeing heritage companies have built every American spacecraft that has transported astronauts into space. And the single-use rockets it builds in partnership with Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) have a virtually unblemished record of mission success.
“We are starting from a position of mission reliability and safety,” Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told Reuters earlier this year when asked about SpaceX and other insurgents aiming to disrupt Boeing on everything from astronaut capsules to rockets to satellites.
“There is a difference between putting cargo in space and putting humans in space, and that’s a big step. Our very deliberate, safety-based approach for things like CST-100, that will be a differentiator in the long run,” Muilenburg said.
The actual technical glitch that stunted Friday’s CST-100 Starliner mission to the International Space Station was a timer error though Boeing said it was too early to determine the exact cause of the fault.
Boeing was already working to surmount other technical and safety-related challenges on the multibillion-dollar NASA human spaceflight program. A government watchdog report in November found Boeing demanded “unnecessary” new contract funds from NASA.
Friday’s glitch adds to a year of intense scrutiny over how Boeing developed its money-spinning 737 MAX jetliner following twin crashes that killed 346 people in five months.
While there is no link between the 737 MAX crashes and the Starliner setback, one rocket industry executive told Reuters that in both cases problems arose as Boeing was racing to catch up with fast-moving rivals.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday December 23 2019, @03:35PM (7 children)
Sounds like Boeing's entire software departments needs a complete revamp. The MCAS failure was bad enough, but the fact that 2 clocks on the same rocket can differ by 11 hours, and nobody caught it in testing, is damning. That's not a minor thing, that's A Big Deal (tm).
As I read in another thread it's damning that when SpaceX has a problem they shut up, then a few weeks or months later tell the world what happened. Boeing, on the other hand, releases a flurry of press releases immediately touting all the things that went right.
What really seals the deal is that the plane and rocket divisions are completely separate. That tells me the problem starts at the top, firing the CEO is a good first start.
Recent research has shown that 1 out of 3 Trump supporters is a stupid as the other 2.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday December 23 2019, @03:55PM (2 children)
Even before Muilenberg, the previous CEO McNerny was responsible for the 787, which was also a management disaster. It seems like the company has been set on a bad course by its board of directors.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday December 23 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
The key word seems to be "managers" instead of "engineers".
Was Boeing at one time about engineering?
If we sing a slaying song tonight, what tools will be used for the slaying?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Monday December 23 2019, @09:48PM
Was Boeing at one time about engineering?
Yes, before merging with McDonnell Douglas. That is the direct cause of this disaster.
Please note that McDonnell Douglas was able to kill 346 [wikipedia.org] people with only one airplane, much more efficient.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 23 2019, @03:56PM
There was some booster rocket, test fired in a horizontal position, some months back, and it suffered an explosion in the test. But the explosion was minor. The company higher up, as I recall, was tripping over himself to describe the test as a "success". Yet how the problem was minor, and could be fixed, but that nothing actually went wrong, as long as you sleezele word it just right.
If we sing a slaying song tonight, what tools will be used for the slaying?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:30PM (1 child)
I think there's a far more insidious problem. Imagine you and I were engaged in a business transaction. I wanted you to make something for me. And I had practically unlimited money, in fact it wasn't even my money I was spending. And personally I didn't really care all that much about when you got the product done as long as you ensured me you were working on it. In fact some of my 'kin' (who influence me) had an active interest in you delaying the project since you were actively contracting work out to them. Your profit optimization there does not involve completing a product, let alone at anything like a viable cost. It involves milking me for all I'm worth, which is a huge amount of other people's money. And that's the exact relationship between Boeing and the government. We went from no space tech in late 1962 when JFK gave his 'We choose to go to the moon speech.' 7 years later we landed a man on the moon. Boeing started being contracted for the SLS in 2010. Today, going on 10 years later? They can't even get to the ISS while competitors such as SpaceX have been doing it, at a fraction of the cost, for years.
This is why, for instance, I think public pharmaceutical research (as a solution to the current hoard of problems with pharmaceuticals) would also fail. Exact same problem. Instead of making the name of the game to manipulate the market, you make the name of the game to manipulate the government - to hit all the minimum checkboxes to maximize funding while minimizing work. A bit of lobbying and carefully targeted "donations" and government will also be down with it. Only solution is to get an Elon Musk of drugs - somebody driven not by profit maximization, but an ideological interest.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 23 2019, @07:02PM
Is that where you get high and start trolling people on Twitter?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:58PM
Somewhere it isn't India.