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NASA freezes Starliner missions

(gizmodo.com)
269 points rntn | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.469s | source
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dotnet00 ◴[19 Oct 24 14:37 UTC] No.41888001[source]▶
Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now.

For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.

They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[19 Oct 24 19:06 UTC] No.41889872[source]▶
> Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now

No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.

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dchichkov ◴[19 Oct 24 19:50 UTC] No.41890240[source]▶
It is unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX.
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JumpCrisscross ◴[19 Oct 24 19:54 UTC] No.41890276[source]▶
> unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX

Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.

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K0balt ◴[20 Oct 24 12:36 UTC] No.41894950[source]▶
Boeing is clearly a company in the death spiral stage of institutional decline. It happens to most institutions, unfortunately, and it will probably happen to spacex one day.

That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.

Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.

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Yeul ◴[20 Oct 24 20:34 UTC] No.41898254[source]▶
Boeing is just bizarre to me.

The aviation industry is seeing massive growth in new Asian markets, their only competition has a massive backlog and STILL Boeing is sinking.

God knows if they could survive an actual recession.

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1. K0balt ◴[21 Oct 24 03:20 UTC] No.41900397[source]▶
I think Boeing is an object lesson in what happens when you have an MBA without an engineering background run a company whose product is cutting edge engineering.

You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center.

So, You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc.

All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering.

So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects.

At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.

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2. kranke155 ◴[21 Oct 24 17:53 UTC] No.41906554[source]▶
Any engineer who wants to do good work will leave if he’s supposed to justify every good decision with 20 forms and 5 layers of management.

Poor leadership will corrode anything including great workers who feel like they can’t get anything done.