NASA freezes Starliner missions

I’m all for Elon buying it and trusting that he makes the necessary changes.

I think I saw recently that SpaceX is worth about 2x Boeing right now.

That would probably mean the end for Starliner.

The government deliberately chooses nore than one supplier for things with high risk to mitigate exactly these kind of issues. Merging them might not even be allowed

I suppose this might be a joke? But it would be a ludicrously anti-competitive move that the government (as one of the main customers) would certainly block.

At least then we'd get all onboard Starlink and tweets warning us when the door's about to fall off.

Nah, sell Boeing to Bezos.

I eagerly await my boeing prime membership to start out good and get increasingly overpriced and junk rapidly over time.

Every second part in the rockets would be counterfeit inside of 5 years.

Spacex is at 180bn

Boeing is at 96bn

I was actually prepared to call bullshit on you, but I stand corrected. I figured Boeing would be worth more with all the other things it does.

Airplane companies are worth surprisingly less than expected for how crucial and important they seem at first glance.

The market is also not as big as you'd think.

But when you get the comingled aircraft in your fleet, will the Chinese knockoff 737s be more or less defective than the next generation Boeings?

Part of the benefit of having Starliner and SpX is redundancy. Having multiple vendors to choose from/have compete each other/use as backups if one is grounded, is a large part of the point. Having anyone, including Musk, have control over both defeats the purpose of redundancy.

Elon is under investigation by the DOJ/SEC so there is the possibility he ends up with jail time given his record.

Also he should probably focus on Tesla and X given how poorly both are doing right now.

It says a lot about the profitability and certification costs in the commercial market.

It's a critical long lead-time, institutional industry, for a nation. But a moneymaker, it's not.

(Even Airbus, if I'm reading it right, is at a USD$120b market cap)

There is absolutely a 0% chance Elon goes to jail.

> How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don't know.

Elon Musk at least thinks it’s a greater than zero possibility.

Soyuz already provides redundancy, albeit not exactly commercial competition. The whole point of the ride sharing agreement with Russia is to prevent both countries from having the other rely on a single vehicle, to ensure the station can continue to operate if either America or Russia is grounded.

Anyway, Boeing isn't a serious competitor to SpaceX and the money should be given to another instead. This should have been done several years ago, but as they say, the second best time to plant an apple tree is now.

SpaceX is dominating the space launch industry and is responsible for just under half of all rockets launched last year (or 90% of US launches). They also have an extremely successful satellite internet service. And most importantly in both sectors SpaceX is innovation leader and rapidly growing.

Boeing is the third largest aircraft manufacturer in the world (behind Airbus and Lockheed), has been in an ongoing crisis for 6 years over the quality of an airplane that was rushed out of the door to react to Airbus's A320neo, is looking to sell ULA which is most of their space launch business, with few success stories about the remaining space-related products under the Boeing brand (like Starliner or SLS). And their defense arm has a decade of stagnating revenue (on the same level as their 2002 revenue).

Everything at SpaceX is pointing to growth, while Boeing's only saving grace is that customer lock-in, their size and importance to national interests (and national security) is slowing their fall.

Elon Musk is pretty skilled at manipulating masses. What he says is what he thinks will make his fans react how he wants it. It does not mean he thinks he will go to prison nor the opposite.

But, he is too rich, too politically connected, too good at making people outraged, so chances he goes to prison are very low regardless of what happened.

> the benefit of having Starliner and SpX is redundancy

Starliner provides zero redundancy. It doesn’t work. If it did, it can’t spin up quickly enough. If it could, it has a limited number of shots for having been designed for an obsolete launch vehicle

Diverging slightly from the topic, Palm (the Palm Pilot company) at one point had a market cap higher than all US airlines combined.

As long as initially I can get shipped off this rock with free delivery it doesn't sound so bad.

Boeing is looking like an old, struggling company in a mature industry.

This is also suggesting to me that commercial aviation isn't going to be seeing that much advancement going forward, rather than incremental changes at a decelerating rate. Strong headwinds, say from the energy transition, may actually shrink it a lot.