[insane_dreamer]

> If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020.

How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century? Granted it's not the same thing as rockets, but still, with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

[dotnet00]

SpaceX was able to accomplish it because they were actually trying. They quickly became the company to go to if you entered aerospace primarily to work yourself hard doing R&D, so they got all the best young aerospace engineers who just wanted to get things done rather than have their soul crushed by the bureacracy at the old space giants.

Meanwhile Boeing and the other old guard were full of jaded "it isn't that easy" types. It's difficult to innovate when your instinctual response to attempts at innovation is to look for excuses on how it won't be that straightforward, that it won't be economical, or that it won't make sense.

Eg, if we look at Falcon 9, first the arguments from old space companies were that launching to orbit is too difficult for an inexperienced company to do reliably ("they don't have spaceflight heritage"), then that they must be cutting corners to bring prices that low, then in the early days of F9 booster reuse, the argument shifted to saying that there wasn't enough stuff to launch to justify the expense (there was the ULA CEO's argument that, for them it'd take 10 flights per booster to break even or ArianeSpace's saying that they'd have to shut down the factories and lose expertise becuase they'd only need a handful of reusable boosters to fully meet demand).

In a way, SpaceX's success is just an engineering version of Planck's principle (https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Planck%27s_principle?&useskin...)

[cratermoon]

> Meanwhile Boeing and the other old guard were full of jaded "it isn't that easy" types.

That has nothing to do with it. Boeing has been a cost-plus defense contractor for so long managed doesn't know how to do fixed-price work. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...

Back in 2023 Boeing execs even said so: https://www.missouribusinessalert.com/industries/technology/...

Prior to the pandemic and the 737Max debacle, though, Boeing would low-bid fixed-price contracts and eat the losses because their commercial aircraft business would cover it, then make up the difference with continued sales. https://www.defenseone.com/business/2022/04/boeings-low-ball...

The only folks who weren't trying here were senior management, who were unable to do anything that wasn't milking the cost-plus contract cow.

[mschuster91]

> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?

Two factors, IMHO. First and biggest one is by being a private company operating on its own budget authority. Basically, SpaceX was free to work in whatever way they wanted - a 180° turn from "established" practice both at NASA and ESA and the political decision makers that the billions of dollars of expenses had to be distributed across the continent fairly to help politicians get reelected. That means instead of dealing with shit tons of suppliers, wasting insane amounts of money on tenders, specification documents and whatnot, SpaceX went in-house for as much as they could, in very very few locations on top of that to save on shipping.

The second one is ossification. Boeing, Airbus, EADS, the major carmakers - they all got big by perfecting (sometimes centuries) old designs by iteration: airframes, cars, combustion engines, rockets, you name it. Straying from the beaten path comes with very high internal risk for anyone involved, and so very little true innovation happens. SpaceX in contrast operated on a green field - a ton of money and a general attitude of "you're free to do whatever the fuck you want, and failures are expected along the path".

Eventually, no doubt there, SpaceX and Tesla will both ossify as well, it's a trap for any large organization - and we're seeing signs with Tesla already, with attention going to the Cybertruck instead of getting the issues with existing models (e.g. fabrication tolerances, spare part availability) under control first.

[TulliusCicero]

It's easy for old, incumbent companies to become ossified, where their internal culture and bureaucracy and processes are hilariously inefficient. At any given time, there will be some people pushing back on that, but there will always be more people there who are okay with it -- because the ones who couldn't handle the ossification left, while the people who were okay with it stayed. Survivorship bias, in other words; sometimes this is called the Dead Sea effect: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-... (this article talks about it in terms of IT competence, but you can easily apply it to other aspects of a business' culture)

That's why it's so important for it to be easy for new entrants to start up in an economic sector. You need them to pressure the old guard, or failing that, to replace them.

[jvanderbot]

Boeing is definitely in on it, but let's be clear, the gov as a consumer was not really asking for 100 launches a year, and was not in the business of paying for the change necessary to completely reinvent lift as a service. So why wouldn't they just keep charging what they were charging, and building what they always did.

There just wasn't an appetite for risk and reinvention, at least not enough to bring it down and start over, the way an eccentric billionaire could.

[TulliusCicero]

> So why wouldn't they just keep charging what they were charging, and building what they always did.

So that they can keep up with any eventual newcomers?

[jvanderbot]

IIRC, large primes have limited IRAD funding for the most part - in some cases fixed %, so to do research you have to charge more to the Gov. That's just plain a "cost saving measure" enacted by government.

[lmm]

> with all the aerospace engineering talent that Boeing must already have had ... Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

Boeing were reverse-acquired by Douglas Aircraft (after they'd reverse-acquired McDonnell) and their terrible quarterly-numbers management has destroyed a lot of Boeing's engineering. But the stock price kept going up which is the important thing, right?

[somenameforme]

Look at a company after about 30 years and basically everybody that was there before, is gone. You keep the same name, the same brand, but all the people are entirely different. And people are, by far, the most important factor in the capabilities of a company. And often times people just aren't really replaceable. But you have to replace them, nonetheless, and so you just end up with something entirely different, even if it has the same name.

An even better example than Boeing is the Apollo program. The degree of competence, efficiency, and speed of that program all under NASA - is completely unlike anything we've ever seen anytime before, or since. JFK gave his 'to the Moon' speech in late 1962, when our grand achievement in space had been nothing beyond on briefly sending a man to orbit just a few months earlier. Less than 7 years later (!!), the first man would set foot on the Moon. The entire Apollo program cost $179 billion over 11 years (inflation adjusted), for a total of $16 billion per year. Their latest annual budget was $25 billion.

[Jtsummers]

Boeing is a grossly inefficient organization, have been for a while. It's not just them, this is typical of the defense contractor side of the house for companies like them. It doesn't help that they're getting the high publicity contracts, lots of low publicity contracts that go about as well and are run about as poorly.

[andyjohnson0]

> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?

I have no particular insight into this subject, but an Ars article [1] from yesterday offers some speculation:

'"The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding," said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program [...]'

and

'SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing's space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company's problem—they were NASA's. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price. Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment.'

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...

[irjustin]

> Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

Definitely part of the reason. They did poach a lot of good people.

SpaceX vs Gov Contractors been the war cry of those who believe Private >> Contractors. Everything Elon has done for SpaceX has been absolutely relentless, and razor focused on the goal. This includes being willing to sacrifice individual's life-balance for the mission. Combine all that with a willingness to do fast iteration and break things where it's "safe" to do so. You've got the ability to disrupt an industry/ecosystem that's gotten lazy and fat over time.

To be clear, Private >> Contractors is not 100% nor is the flip. There are too many examples of both directions either working or not working.

[phkahler]

>> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time

Because they already had Dragon sending cargo to the ISS at the start of the commercial crew program. They used the money to upgrade and get man rated. Boeing started their capsule from scratch. This still doesn't explain all of it, but nobody else has mentioned their head start.

[resolutebat]

Boeing has been building stuff for space since the early days of the Apollo program, including the Space Shuttle and big slabs of the ISS. If anything they should have had a head start on anything human rated.

[panick21_]

While that experienced helped, its not as as simple. The Crew Dragon was far more then just man rating the Cargo Dragon. It was a complete redesign, the structure is totally different. And the really hard part are things like the Launch escape system, SpaceX actually developed new engine from the ground, Boeing didn't.

SpaceX also got far less money, Boeing received like 80% more money.

[MangoCoffee]

ULA started a long time ago before SpaceX. It's really unfair to say Boeing doesn't have a head start. if anything, ULA/Boeing failed because their leadership

[nolongerthere]

Likely sunk cost fallacy. Space flight is still new enough that starting from scratch lets you use all the lessons that were learned from your predecessors while not getting stuck in the muck of institutional inertia. And you still aren't that far behind the more experienced competition. Unlike say, a commodity like candles that doesn't have anything new to discover, and the existing manufactures cannot be out innovated.

[necheffa]

Not to mention the bureaucracy tax; Boeing has had far more time to let the bureaucracy metastasize.

[tim333]

I know a lot of people here hate Musk but he's actually pretty good at the rocket stuff. If you see him going around being interviewed on Everyday Astronaut he knows the design and trade offs of every part. I doubt you'd see that with Boeing management. It's a bit of a shame he's shifted to ranting on Twitter/X.

[raverbashing]

> Did SpaceX poach all of Boeing/Airbus' best people?

No

For one, SpaceX can't even hire non-citizens from what I understand

But yeah they probably poached some ULA, some LM, also from some other companies.

[somenameforme]

That's nothing to do with SpaceX specifically. The same applies to any American company building long range rockets. The government classifies this as weapons technology, and so it falls under ITAR - the International Traffic in Arms Regulations [1]. And hiring a foreign employee (or even a multi-national employee) is considered equivalent to a transfer of the underlying technology to that individual's home country or countries. In cases where this would be unlawful, which is most, hiring such persons would be unlawful.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

[raverbashing]

> That's nothing to do with SpaceX specifically

Correct, and I never said it was