Boeing Sent Two Astronauts Into Space. Now It Needs to Get Them Home.
Helium leaks and thruster problems prompt NASA and Boeing to delay astronauts' return on company's Starliner vehicle
Boeing succeeded in getting NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, following weeks of delays. Returning them to Earth on the same spacecraft is proving another challenge.
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Isn't space too important for Boeing to be fricking up like this making holes in the theory that it's only the public boeing section that's incompetent and things must be totally fine in the private segment?
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There's a good chance that any engineer working on this would need security clearance, which means you won't get your spaceship software written by some dude in India making 15/hr.
Also NASA has very strict code quality standards IIRC, but I'm not sure whether that would apply to entities like Boeing or spacex.
I assume the same idea would apply to other engineering disciplines but
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They've relaxed them somewhat, but they would require them on anything that goes to space, or interacts with it.
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yes but even so the ship fricked up which suggests that they are giving clearance to not the best of us.
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Wonder where the best are going...
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That's still worrying in its own way that the US doesn't have enough competent engineers in the entire country to be able to have two functioning spacecraft companies at the same time.
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You say that like its just a matter of know how. Almost no one does rocketry because of the insane difficulty and costs associated with this. Spacex made it profitable but they literally paved the way thanks to a millionaire blowing $100M of his own money on a gamble that almost failed to pay off. Its not about competence, its about how many companies are willing to fund several multi-ten to multi-hundred million dollar near guaranteed failures to achieve competence in a field where youre decades behind a competitor.
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Boeing is an established company. Its engineer competence went down right along the time frame when SpaceX began picking up the best engineers.
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Yeah, they went down when a competing company had over $100M invested in its rocket, achieved success, and sought to make a bigger one with the ability to land. SpaceX is the company who made that massive investment which is why they won. Blue Origin hasnt even launched, they keep going back to the drawing board which is exactly the issue, they treat their investment carefully before launching rather than blowing the tens of millions needed to figure out where the frickups actually are. Boeing has just one real launch and it happened like 2 weeks ago. No rocket will be a one hit wonder due to engineering, you really need a lot of trial and error, but its daunting because one trial and guaranteed error means 40 million down the drain. SpaceX succeeded literally because of their "just pour more money into the fire until it stops burning" strategy.
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this supports my point?
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The best engineers want to make $$$ and thus would not work for Boeing.
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you would hope, right?
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They all apply to the standards set by NASA on the Commercial Crew Program, plus SpaceX and Boeing Space aren't allowed to hire immigrants unless they have a Green Card.
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Yeah that makes sense. I'm surprised they even allow green card immigrants tbh. I have a green card and I cannot apply to most roles like this.
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There are divisions and programs within SpaceX that are probably US citizens only. I just remember Musk saying that Green card holders are the only foreigners they're allowed to hire.
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Defense side is fricked too. They just don't like to mention it because part of it was Trump not letting them get away with fixed cost plus costs contract.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/27/boeing-trump-air-force-one-deal-00028216
https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2024/02/01/boeing-defense-unit-reports-139m-loss-across-three-major-programs/
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It really depends on which contract you're on and how large the contract is.
Large contracts have a lot of room to hide frick ups.
It is insane that they got away with cost plus contracts lol.
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Yes
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