[skissane]

> I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts?

I think SpaceX has been doing a great job of that, with Crew Dragon.

> Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then?

Yes, but also fewer options. This is the first time NASA has ever had a choice between two completely different American spacecraft to return crew on. It is like if you own two cars, and one is having mechanical problems, so you decide to take the more reliable one for a long trip; but if you only own one car, you would just have risked it with your only car, since you don't have much choice

> Is Boeing genuinely this bad?

Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting – in which cost overruns are charged to the taxpayer – to the new world of fixed price contracts. Not just with NASA, also with Pentagon projects such as the KC-46 aerial refuelling tanker.

By contrast, SpaceX is a much younger company, so it never had that cost-plus culture. Plus, it has the advantage of being privately held – so no stock market to satisfy – and investors who are confident in its long-term prospects, so it isn't afraid to lose money on contracts in the short-term, expecting to make it back in the longer-run. By contrast, Boeing is tempted to cut corners in the development process to limit their losses on the contract.

According to the rumour mill, part of how this whole fiasco happened: Boeing gave Aerojet Rocketdyne incorrect requirements specs for the thrusters. Boeing then sent Aerojet updated specs, but Aerojet refused to redesign the thrusters according to the new specs unless it was paid more by Boeing, which Boeing didn't want to do. So instead Boeing just decided to risk it with the incorrectly designed thrusters. They cooked up some analysis to justify that doing so was safe, but obviously that analysis was wrong.

[aredox]

Not too wrong as it made it back to Earth.

> Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then?

NASA lost enough people during their "higher risk tolerance" epoch that they don't want to go through it again. Challenger and Columbia were such huge traumas each time...

[skissane]

> Not too wrong as it made it back to Earth.

The contractual requirement was for max 1-in-1000 probability of loss of crew on re-entry.

Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that due to these thruster issues, the actual probability had increased to 1-in-100.

In that scenario, it is totally expected that Starliner made it back to earth in one piece – there was a 99% chance it would happen. Yet simultaneously, 1% is 10 times riskier than 0.1%, and NASA absolutely made the right call in not putting astronauts on it when they had the choice.

The real issue, apparently, is NASA wasn't even confident in calculating that probability, since there were aspects of how the thrusters were behaving which nobody could explain. Although ground-based testing replicated some similar issues, the issues reproduced on the ground had some key differences from those occurring in space, and nobody had a convincing explanation for the differences.

Due to the flawed design, Boeing was pushing components past their certified thermal limits. And how they behave when you do that isn't well understood, because the industry standard approach is to not do that. Due to safety margins, you can get away with it to an extent – but exactly how far you can get away with it, and how exactly they will fail when they eventually do – those aren't questions people have a lot of experience in answering.

[ghaff]

The bottom line is that there was uncertainty that couldn't really be disentangled from various other Boeing issues over the past couple years. As a result, even if nothing happened there would have been no shortage of criticism that NASA was behaving recklessly so the rational behavior was to proceed in the apparently prudent manner.

[ReptileMan]

I think it was the other way around. In the higher risk tolerance era they only had the Apollo 1 fire. The shuttle clusterfucks happened when they no longer knew how to evaluate risks because of organizational culture.

[fzeindl]

> Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting.

How is this old style? At least in software development / IT-consulting in Europe cost plus is done all the time now, since there were too many legal battles about fixed price not being finished according to spec.

[ted_dunning]

The history of IT-consulting in Europe does not really inform us of the history of aerospace development in the US.

The fact is, space development used to be done on a cost-plus basis (old style) and is now moving strongly to a fixed cost basis (the current facts of life).

[skissane]

> How is this old style? At least in software development / IT-consulting in Europe cost plus is done all the time now,

For NASA, it is old style: why offer cost-plus contracting when companies like SpaceX are willing to accept a firm fixed price contract and actually deliver on it?

There is no way that SpaceX is making a profit on their lunar lander contract (Starship HLS). But SpaceX doesn’t care because they are betting the company on Starship and returning humans to the moon after over 50 years is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of their platform to the world. Boeing isn’t betting the company on a spaceship. Taking a multi-billion dollar loss on a contract today and hoping you’ll make it back somehow some years down the track is not the Boeing way - at least not nowadays

> since there were too many legal battles about fixed price not being finished according to spec.

Maybe in space it helps to have clearly defined success criteria - either it gets there and back in one piece, or it doesn’t. In software the criteria for success are often a lot less clear.

[ivewonyoung]

> There is no way that SpaceX is making a profit on their lunar lander contract (Starship HLS). But SpaceX doesn’t care because they are betting the company on Starship and returning humans to the moon after over 50 years is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of their platform to the world

So in essence SpaceX is subsidizing the government and taxpayer, while the usual rhetoric is that SpaceX is getting government subsidies, not sure why folks cannot understand the different between a government contract to deliver something and a subsidy.

[tim333]

There'a an answer here on what went wrong. It seems some Boeing management knew the thrusters could overheat but didn;t fix it to save a few bob https://anythingspaceastronomy.quora.com/Boeing-Management-o...

It seems rather reminiscent of their other problems of doing a hack on the 737 Max which caused the crashes and ignoring safety inspections which caused the panel to blow out.

It's kind of interesting if you see Musk talk about the rockets design it's evident he pretty much understands it all and controls the money and so is able to make sensible decisions to do this, don't do that - see this 2021 vid for example https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw . With Boeing you get the impression you don't really have that and you have an accountant type saying your budget for this is $x without undertanding they engineering they are paying for.

[tiahura]

Did you actually read the link you posted? It discusses a failure in involving designing and communicating specifications, not trying to save a buck.

[tim333]

Ah right you are. I got my links muddled. I was kind of thinking of this one that had the "Boeing didn't want to pay vendors for design changes" idea. I'm not sure that's proven though.

https://x.com/theJordanNoone/status/1823421499686183220

[skissane]

See this from Eric Berger:

> "Boeing and Rocketdyne more or less hated one another," one person involved in the test told Ars. "Everyone was in super-defensive mode even before this happened. It had been classified as a risk, but the two sides weren’t talking openly and honestly about it."

> What was the source of the animosity? After Boeing selected Rocketdyne, according to sources, it asked for changes to some system specifications. This prompted Rocketdyne to ask for a change order fee, as is customary in government contracts. That infuriated Boeing, which thought it had a partnership with Rocketdyne, but the latter company saw itself as a contractor. As a result, the Boeing and Rocketdyne teams were effectively walled off from one another and did not iterate together toward a more effective propulsion system.

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

[dartos]

Didn’t get a ton of grants from the government? Like $15B over the last 20 years.

https://qz.com/elon-musks-spacex-and-tesla-get-far-more-gove....

Is that not “cost-plus?”

[skissane]

“Cost-plus” means a government contract where if the contract ends up costing more than you expected, the government will cover the shortfall. Versus “firm fixed price”, where if the vendor underestimates the expense of implementing the contract, the vendor wears that loss, not the government.

SpaceX received over US$15 billion in US federal government contracts, but the vast majority (maybe even all?) of them were firm fixed price. I’m not aware that SpaceX has any cost-plus federal contracts; Boeing has multiple cost-plus contracts with NASA (not Starliner; contracts like SLS Core Stage, EUS, ISS engineering support) and many more with the Pentagon. Cost-plus is the norm for Boeing and firm fixed price is the exception; for SpaceX, firm fixed price is the norm.

[manuelmoreale]

> Is that not “cost-plus?”

No it is not. From wiki:

> A cost-plus contract, also termed a cost plus contract, is a contract such that a contractor is paid for all of its allowed expenses, plus additional payment to allow for risk and incentive sharing.

Spacex has received money over the last 20 years because they were awarded different contracts and they provided different services to the government.

From re-supplying the ISS, to launching satellites, to taking people to orbit.

[ivewonyoung]

Grants are very different from contracts.