Sometimes it boggles the mind how much money the gov't spends to achieve fairly pedestrian ends. Solid rocket boosters for the shuttle is a good example. Just a big kickback for the ICBM business in Colorado, no real science behind using them to put people in space :(
It might not have been the best solution but it was a solution
Of course, it remains to be seen if SpaceX's scheme for engine reuse will pan out.
(see past discussion of a Shuttle mission auto-shutdown, where the Shuttle main engines were shut down seconds before lift-off)
Yes, but the Shuttle was far worse than most in that regard. It's abort modes were limited at best and crazy/non-existent at worst.
The main problem was actually the weight load as the shuttle was hanging off the side.
Even in open source, there are often competing solutions to the same problem. Rather than have a joint committee decide the best approach (to the code, to the development process, etc), the decision is made by users choosing which software works for them. That's good.
The "keeping secrets" part is what's different. It would be nice for consumers if these companies shared knowledge while they compete, as open source software projects do. But 1) their secrets won't stay secret forever, 2) the ability to have secrets helps them compete, and 3) it's an acceptable short-term loss for the long-term gain of more effort spent on the problem.
Competition creates one sole perspective: make more money than the others. This gives companies no swinging room to be 'good' instead of profitable. Also, corporations are completely void of democracy and shouldn't be legal.
Openness in itself is not bad but is not a requirement for unique engineering. See what Lockheed's Skunkworks did with SR-71 for example.
They boosted on decades of aeronautics research and individual talent - these provided the raw materials. They then combined these to reach the specific design intent.
In short: you can share a theory but not a chain of command or process without costs of then having a process to control this sharing.
It's also much better to have parallel vehicle designs at this early age of our space efforts than pour everything into a single megaeffort.
The only thing that matters is what people are cooperating and competing to accomplish.
They can, and this may be one of those times. But that doesn't mean it isn't driven by competition, or at least the desire to be seen to compete.
> Competition is such a sham
It isn't when it works. Competition is why you can afford a car, most of the stuff in your house, an internet connection and so on. In places where there is only one vendor prices are as a rule a lot higher than when multiple parties court the same group of potential customers.
> and as per usual: nobody is arguing for why cooperation is bad
Cooperation has it's place, nobody needs to argue why cooperation would be bad. But in the case of Boeing and SpaceX it is fair to call them competitors because they are independent entities looking to serve the same customers.
And by the way, it's a false dichotomy between cooperation and competition in the case of companies one alternative to both competition and cooperation is cartel forming.
> ya'll just keep spewing that corporate bs.
I don't think that was called for.
They don't have the same goal. Musk's goal is to get to Mars. Boeing's goal is to protect itself from obsolescence.
We tried a "lets stop competition and just have the government run everything with everyone sharing everything." It was called Communism and was responsible for the deaths of 100m people, set up some of the worst regimes history has ever seen, had unparalleled human rights disasters, and people today are still paying the price of such mistakes in a variety of ways. If you think approaches like these work, then I suspect you have an overly-idealized view of human nature.
Trade secrets aren't that common. Most of what these companies do are taught at college. Implementation differences, marketing/advertising, finding new and different markets, etc matter. Innovation quickly spreads by its nature. Having different companies with different management styles and no company, ideally, being 'too big to fail' is a social benefit, not a liability. The tedium of reinventing the wheel is a small price to pay here, especially when you consider how quickly/cheaply this tedium is tackled in practice.
>Haven't you heard about open source?
FOSS has failed to take over many important markets. It is full of boneheaded decisions and PHB-type antics as well as teenage-level drama, forks, and angry fanboyism. Heck, a lot of open source 'successes' are only such because a proprietary commercial entity took an open codebase and layered closed and proprietary layers on top of it (OSX, Android, Safari, etc). Its not a fix-all for the human endeavor. Competitive approaches make sense and have been proved to be effective over and over to the point where this isn't even arguable. Imagine if someone told Elon that he should just get a job at NASA instead of trying to start his own company. If you heard that I imagine you'd be singing a different tune. Why the double standard with Boeing then?
I think a lot of young people are fed this kind of far-lefty politics from a young age to be anti-corporate anti-US and anti-competition without ever being exposed to the positive aspects of those things. I think if you grew up reading Chomsky/Zinn/Trotsky/Marx, you're doing yourself a disservice on how well capitalism works and the benefits of the US-led capitalistic experiment we're all part of that has been paying dividends for two hundred plus years and continues to with ex-communist nations doing nothing but copying our system as best they can. Even 'Socialist' nations are little more than capitalist democracies with token social welfare spending via taxation.
I wouldn't bury competition as outdated just yet. Those who have in history have themselves been buried.