Apparently Space Is Too Hard For Boeing
OK @BoeingSpace if you cannot perform at the pace that is required to complete commercial crew tasks then why did you submit bids to do things at this pace? Shouldn't you have informed NASA that there would be issues? BTW you got a lot more money than @SpaceX did. Just sayin' https://t.co/CYacTLcNLn
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 20, 2020
They seem to fumble the PR side of each of their failures, adding fuel to the fire with poorly considered statements like this one. I remember how badly Ma Bell did when we forced the RBOC breakup. Same thing. Patently feeble excuses for lack of responsiveness to their (captive) users.
This is a company with more profound problems than the symptoms appear to indicate.
When you have paid off enough politicians you know you can get away with things like this.
Boeing, as operator of both Shuttle and ISS knew better than anyone else exactly what the schedule pressures would be to establish commercial transportation services. But, like NASA itself Boeing failed to develop or maintain the expertise base for being able to implement new systems and programs. Boeing seemed to be placing inexperienced, unproven people on programs and drawing the programs out as long as they could in an effort to make more from the US taxpayer. They did not count on new companies, like Space X, bypassing the Boeing capabilities.
This is similar to what Martin-Marietta did in 1989, when it laid off 3500 engineers from the Waterton, Colorado, main plant. They hired new grads to replace some of the experienced people, but kept almost no one with experience. Then they wondered why they had probes crashing or missing Mars, and other things falling out of the sky in flaming pieces! Instead of offering pay cuts in lieu of being “doorknobbed” (as in don’t let it hit you…), they just surplussed us. Never was able to get back into the aerospace industry directly! Well, the dinosaurs are watching the new mammals start to scarf up all the goodies! Sometimes you have to bend with the wind, or break!
Yes, the challenge of an old NASA contractor trying to adapt to the new contracting system. They just are not able to function without all the review meetings, approval of review meetings, NASA oversight meetings, NASA reviews, etc. that added all those decades to the Orion and SLS…
No. They just let all the expertise walk out of the door after Shuttle. Couple that with the sad decline of the company’s engineering base (as shown by the various debacles going on).
The problem of having a workforce with a high average age. The Shuttle was designed and built in the 1970’s so those experts deserved their retirement after decades on the job. The last capsule to fly for NASA was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 so those experts left long ago. The workforce that stayed on only knew about building space capsules from what they read in the old manuals and books.
Boeing never built a manned spacecraft prior to their commercial crew contract. Mercury, Gemini and Skylab were built by McDonnell Douglas. The Apollo CSM and Space Shuttle Orbiter were built by Rockwell. And the LM was built by Grumman.
The ISS prime contractor was McDonnell Douglas for the overall framework of the space station and key operational systems, including propulsion, communications, navigation, control centers, air locks, a visual dome, thermal management and its mobile space crane. Boeing inherited this work after MDC was bought by Boeing in 1997.
You would think that by 2012 when the commercial crew contracts were placed with Boeing and SpaceX, that the 15 years of experience on ISS would have made it easier for Boeing to keep pace on commercial crew. Evidently not according to the Boeing CEO.
McDac and Boeing had fairly equal roles in the design of what became ISS but building the pieces became pretty much like commercial crew, the pace was slow and the costs continuously increasing. In the end NASA traded much of the manned part of the ISS to ESA and its affiliates or contractors. Only the US Lab, Node 1 and part of the Airlock were built by Boeing. Other pieces like the other Nodes, Cupola, Logistics elements had some design done by NASA but were built by Europeans. Other pieces like the US Hab Module were cancelled thanks to Boeing overruns. The commercial crew saga had its origins decades ago. Space X is showing that Americans can still compete.
space engineering isn’t too hard for Boeing …
competition is ! and not olde school (old boys network) competition (more of the same) … competition from outsiders.
Space flight is hard when you don’t have to try.
Yeah, Boeing really wanted commercial crew to be a single provider program. Good thing for the ISS program that Congress continued to fund two providers, or the US would still be reliant on Russia for crew transportation to ISS.
To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Boeing doth protest too much, methinks. They didn’t think in a million years that SpaceX would ever beat them to the punch.
I imagine their entire strategy was to run out the clock and then congress down select to just them.. and then they could really turn the screws.
Does anybody remember the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” Not enough people have read it, and it still holds up today. Ya gotta deal with change!
Awww, poor baby! Cry me a river! Keith nails it with his comments.
Space X was paid much less and had much more interference and supervision from NASA and yet they will have flown crew to the ISS twice before Boeing will fly an uncrewed demonstration mission to the ISS once. Indeed, Space X may well fly the Spaceship on an orbital flight before Boeing will successfully fly an uncrewed demonstration mission to the ISS.
It is way past time we stop giving legacy space all the breaks.
Steinbeck wrote about the time that giants fall. He was referring of course to the point where children have learned enough about their world where the flaws of their parents are noticed, but it’s worth mentioning here.
Boeing didn’t just do this to themselves, but they helped reveal the missing plates in the armor of all of old space and by so thoroughly and officially bungling this very public attempt at fixed-price contracting, they’ve handed the baton over to it. All of the politicians who worked behind the scenes to get them the contract, and fought for a down-select to a single provider, have now lost face.
Combined with the scathing rebuke of Boeing from NASA last fall regarding their lunar logistics proposal, they have effectively pulled a “Windows 8” and will now have to fight for every scrap.
How hard you hit the ground depends very much on how high up you started.
SpaceX made it a goal to lower costs, and they understood and demonstrated that one of the key methods to do that is to give high priority to maximizing production efficiency. If that is not made a high enough priority, then the result will be both higher costs and a slower pace. Attempting to fix the slower pace solely by putting pressure on it causes problems, which is what they are admitting to, or using as an excuse depending on the viewpoint. Even better would be if they admit that production efficiency wasn’t a high enough priority from the outset.
Boeing has become complacent with cost plus US Government contracts. Metrics like lowering cost and increasing production efficiency simply do not come into play in cost plus contracts. So, it’s not surprising that they would stumble when handed a fixed price contract.
There is some evidence that Boeing and its supporters in Congress tried to get NASA to reduce the number of commercial crew providers to one (presumably that would be Boeing, since they were the “trusted contractor” going into this). Since that failed, they’ve been forced to compete head to head with SpaceX.
The end result appears to be that ongoing competition between two providers is a good thing. I’d like to see NASA incorporate much more of this in the future. Having single source providers for multi-billion dollar mega projects (e.g. SLS/Orion) is the polar opposite of continued competition, and we’ve seen how badly that fails time and time again at NASA (and DOD).
Yes. NAS for example has a competitive alternative to the SLS/Orion, but refuses to recognize it. So the SLS/Orion program continues as a tragic comedy of schedule slips and massive cost over runs.
Don’t confuse NASA with the Congressional Critters who mandated the SLS/Orion program.
The heritage of both the Orion and SLS date to Administrator Griffin, so they belong to NASA. That was even something that a recent audit pointed out. All Congress did was to keep the pork flows promised by Dr. Griffin flowing.
And you do not believe that Griffin was vetted BEFORE becoming administrator and told what exactly was expected by him? It is not like it was a surprise Griffin took the path he did.. he was voted for the position for the exact reason of keeping the pork flowing.
I once worked for a small aerospace company where the boss kept undermining solutions right after we agreed to them. Later, in explaining it, he admitted to me he wanted us to “do things like Boeing does. Boeing never leaves any money behind.” Basically, he wanted us keep the project going as long as possible, even if it meant pointless expensive side tracks, because he knew the customer was on the hook and hadn’t reached the point of cancelling.
I quit the next week.
So are airliners, apparently.
I did some research a few months ago. Guess who is the LEADING spacecraft manufacturer in the world? Oh, and most of those satellites are for commercial space.
Have to be the folks rolling out the monolithic slab like satcom buses. According to Wikipedia a total of 538 of such slabs have launched into orbit including 60 test slabs. Should have another 115 slabs going up soon.
The sooner the slab constellation become operations the sooner people can depart ways with Comcast and its irk.
If you are referring to Starlink you’re correct as far as advancement pace in the industry. However, I don’t think that printing off a gazillion copies of the same spacecraft in two years makes SpaceX the global industry leaders in spacecraft manufacturer…yet. I have read that they may have potential customers for that bus however, and that would put their feet on the path in building commercial satellites for others. I haven’t seen indicators that they want to disrupt that industry though. Heaven help Boeing, Lockheed, Thales Alena Space and numerous others if they do.
I would say the leading “commercial” satellite maker in the world right now is Maxar-SSL-Loral in Palo Alto(going even further back the Ford-Philco-Western division). While they technically might count as “old space” almost everything they do even for the government is done on a firm fixed price bases. SSL is also more politically aligned with SpaceX being members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation(in fact the only “Old Space” member of the CSF) but not the Boeing-Lockmart dominated Coalition for Deep Space Exploration.
If you are referring to the ex Hughes satellite business now owned by Boeing yes, it once was a leader in the hey day of Hughes and to be clear it is still an important player with significant commercial business but not like it used to have.
I would also argue that much of the Shuttle and Apollo era expertise that Boeing had disappeared when Boeing shutdown the huge Rockwell Downey site and moved everything to Huntsville and Houston. Funny SpaceX is located like 10 minutes away from the old Rockwell Downey campus.
No need to sell satellites to customers. They can just leased some bandwidth capacity from a constellation with excessive capacity.
Alternately customers can added payload packages to some of the slabs.
What is another 60 slabs inclement going to cost with hardware in a high volume production line riding up on flight proven launchers. Think AWS.
IIRC the slab constellation’s individual components have a service life of about 5 years. So you need to replace at least 2400 slabs annually after full deployment. Just for the satellites already approved by the FCC. not including 30k additional slabs being in the process of getting approved.
Another piece of the Boeing-SpaceX puzzle not commonly known is the role Harry Rosen(inventor off the geo satellite at Hughes) played in getting Musk to start Tesla at the same time he was still “consulting” for Boeing/Hughes. Rosen introduced Elon to the other co-founders of Tesla. Rosen himself tried starting his own electric car company after leaving Hughes in 1989. Supposedly the idea for Tesla was hatched in a restuarant in El Segundo near Hughes and Space’x then offfices.