[kortilla]

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers.

You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

[throwawayacc2]

Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.

The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.

Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.

All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.

I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .

[svnt]

Probably there was a long history of people proposing fixes to this particular problem. While a specific technical issue was obvious to him, the problem was not understood at that level by those in charge. Those in charge also had far more to lose than he did by accepting the input of yet another expert on faith.

Chalking this up to pointless bureaucracy is in a sense the inverse of the “build it like that but six inches to the left” class of requests from non-technical stakeholders.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

If it's not understood then those are the wrong people to be making decisions wrt to the problem.

[yodelshady]

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out.

The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.

[treis]

That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA.

In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.

[stonemetal12]

My understanding is what you are suggesting is how it works. The only question is how to measure "slightly different". FAA thought the differences were bigger than slightly and needed more than a little training. So Boeing tried to use software to paper over the differences.

[jhugo]

This requirement was actually pushed on Boeing by Southwest. They insisted that the MAX not require training for their pilots, and with Southwest being a large 737 customer with other good options (A320), Boeing found a way.

[coldtea]

>Airlines do well

Isn't airlines one of the worst performing industries, with companies which often require subsidies, and are always on the verge of collapsing?

And that has been this way, way before Covid...

[zaphar]

Sure, but the article did not make this argument at all. It made zero effort to examine the current state of things and the various reasons and purposes behind it. It merely advocated for blowing it all up. If you want to make a convincing argument then you need to do more than ask for a return to a previous state totally ignoring the reasons we got to the current state.

It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.

[prox]

I think NASA vs SpaceX is a good example. The Artemis costs about 4 billion dollars each flight

The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director.

Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.

[bumby]

Both these numbers are somewhat speculative at this point, since neither has seen a successful orbital flight.

But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NASA. They needed a customer willing to take a risk with big contracts on non-profitable ventures to initially fund their infrastructure and R&D. Their existence is symbiotic.

[prox]

Well it’s interesting to see the comparison between risk averse / risk embracing which is kind of the topic here. Are there other areas where companies can be disruptive because of the foundation other “end game/risk averse/bound by laws” companies have laid?

It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?

[bumby]

I'll admit there is an argument about risk aversion of civil servants, but I don't think that's necessarily the issue at hand here.

NASA's implementation of different Center's actually addresses a risk that SpaceX doesn't have to necessarily consider (or at least to the same magnitude). Namely, it's meant to address political risk. NASA's missions almost always span multiple administrations, meaning they risk being defunded each election cycle. This is mitigated by spreading the political reward across multiple districts, who then have politicians with a vested interest in keeping those programs going. The downside of this is a lack of efficiency. Unlike SpaceX, NASA can't build up a single location to build and test rockets. If they did, there would be two Senators who want to keep it and likely 48 others who want it defunded in order to fund their own pet programs. So we have programs managed out of Ohio, tested in New Mexico, Mississippi, and California, funded out of Texas, and launched out of Florida.

I'd argue they aren't "risk adverse", but they mitigate a different set of risks. In any event, SpaceX can't be "disruptive" without the complicit help of the organization they are disrupting. It isn't really disruption, but a symbiotic relationship as intended. SpaceX actually gets to outsource a lot of their risk to the American taxpayer because their early (and major) customer (NASA) is self-insured. It's much easier to take on a lot of risk if somebody else is footing the bill.

I think a major risk to SpaceX that people don't really talk about is the bureaucratic quality risk. Right now, SpaceX doesn't have to meet the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. That allows them to streamline their efforts, but also implies an increase in risk. (Most requirements are a response to some risk). However, if any bad event happens like god-forbid they lose astronauts, you can bet additional requirements will be levied. This may really impact their "disruptive" advantage. Look at the example of their F9 strut failing in 2015. For some reason, SpaceX didn't levy supplier quality checks prior to the accident even though it's common practice in industry. Now, they do. The real question is if they were making risk informed decisions previously or just naïve.