> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
Atlas V . . . is America's longest-serving active rocket. In August 2021, ULA announced that Atlas V would be retired, and all 29 remaining launches had been sold.[ As of 10 November 2022, 19 launches remain.
Kinda new, because it has seen 2 flights, of which 1 a mission failure (failed to insert into target orbit due to software issues, several other issues identified hours before a potential hard mission failure), and the other an uncrewed test flight.
The "brand new space vehicle" is the Starliner.
> that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the "soft links" in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft
* parachute "load limit data wasn’t correct and restest showed failure at a loading point"
* wiring tape "flammable and will need to be replaced"
* thrusters again: "Boeing also found more valve problems on the Crewed Flight Test capsule, as they were getting ready to load propellants onboard."
source: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/06/twis-20230602/#more-...
So it gets 50% of your trust, then?
> The company, which is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security, was formed in December 2006.
Boeing announced in May 2016 that their first crewed flight would be delayed to 2018 due to issues related to Starliner's Atlas V N22 launch vehicle. [0]
Starliner's problem isn't delays--it is a failed program. The only thing delayed is terminating the program and selling those high value but soon to depreciate Atlas V boosts to something worth doing. (7 of 29 remaining Atlas V (as of 2022) are allocated to Starliner. To get past 7 requires a whole new integration/test/certification for Starliner.)
Each contract required four successful demonstrations to achieve human rating for the system: pad abort, uncrewed orbital test, launch abort, and crewed orbital test. [0]
Test Boeing [1] SpaceX [2]
pad abort 2019-11-04 2015-05-06
uncrewed orbital test 2022-05-19 2019-03-08
launch abort N/A 2020-01-19
crewed orbital N/A 2020-08-02
The comments section of any Ars Starliner article is a must-read for me. These guys were devout Boeing haters and would endlessly praise SpaceX - that is, until Elon become public enemy #1 last year and they suddenly and abruptly shifted their hate and derision the other way. Not a single independent thought on that entire forum, unless you sort by most critical and painstakingly weed through the hidden comments. The articles are crafted to be red meat for their core readership. At least The Register is unashamedly a tabloid and doesn't pretend they're not. Interesting to see how they spin this.
Branson is a billionaire who tried to do spaceflight long before Elon and Virgin Galactic has never launched anything useful as far as I know.
Everyone wants to believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars.
I think the contrast between Musk's SpaceX and Twitter experiences is largely down to whether the organization grew up around Musk. SpaceX has an immune system built up for the nutty stuff, from Gwynne Shotwell on down. Twitter got thrown into the deep end with zero staff powerful enough or with the experience to do the post-idea cleanup work.
It's a huge mistake to say "Elon had nothing to do with SpaceX's success". It's also a huge mistake to say "SpaceX's success means Musk's Twitter plans are good".
SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.
Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.
SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.
IIRC when FH had turned out to be harder than expected and not really all that useful due to F9's increased performance, Elon had wanted to cancel it, but Gwynne insisted that it stay because they had already sold it to customers and dropping projects like that would be bad for business.
From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.
How Branson shuffles money around between VG and VO is irrelevant if the goal is getting into space.
It's insane that they insist on and advertise being manually controlled by humans as a selling point.
> But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
A few month delay? It was originally supposed to fly in 2017. with Crews in 2020.
Hell, the launch article for Crew-1 (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-t...) literally did not once mention that that launch was delayed, let alone 3 separate year+ delays. Just about SpaceX "saving" NASA from "wandering around in the wilderness with no access to space".
> and the situation in Russia
Presumably you mean the Ukraine invasion, which had zero bearing on this, given that it happened nearly a year and a half later...
I’m not sure how you can say the Ukraine invasion has zero bearing on the “NASA…having no access to space”. Given starliner is a dumpster fire and NASA would not be able to reliably count on Soyuz for access to ISS, it was a remarkably prescient statement. Even if Russia hadn’t invaded in 2020 it was obvious that NASA having its own capability to get to ISS was a strategic priority, that was only achieved by SpaceX.
SpaceX is at Crew 7, Starliner isn't even close to Starliner-1
That's only true if you assume SpaceX strictly allocated budgets per program and that no revenue from their other missions have gone to the crewed flight programs.
I'm not saying Spaceliner is a success, or that there are arguments to be made about each company's approach (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
None of that removes the fairly evident bias that Ars can be counted on to spin anything SpaceX in a positive manner (a la ignoring years of delays to talk of SpaceX saving the day for NASA, while a refusal to commit to a launch date following a just discovered issue for Boeing immediately implies more years of delays).
It Eric Berger, not "Ars". And he absolutly did report on all the SpaceX delays. After the testing explosion he even said SpaceX might be behind. Stop spreading your conspircy threory nonsense.
Never said he didn't. I am saying that Berger, who is writing for Ars as its Senior Space Editor, completely neglects to mention any delay whatsoever when talking about the Crew-1 launch, and spins a lack of a confirmed updated launch date less than three weeks after discovery of issues into a delay that will approach 2025, "perhaps even after Crew-9", which is hilarious given that even Crew-8 doesn't have a launch date other than towards the middle of next year, and Crew-7 is currently facing new delays.
That's nothing to do with conspiracy theories - that's a journalist's open bias showing.
The Crew-1 delay was three years ago. Why would he mention it in this article?
> spins a lack of a confirmed updated launch date less than three weeks after discovery of issues into a delay that will approach 2025
Reasonable, given how it's gone so far. They've yet another parachute issue, and accidentally used "hundreds of feet" of flammable tape.
> "perhaps even after Crew-9", which is hilarious given that even Crew-8 doesn't have a launch date other than towards the middle of next year, and Crew-7 is currently facing new delays
Crew-9 in 2024 is hardly an unreasonable assumption. Crew-8 is scheduled NET February 2024, not "middle of next year". Crew-7 is facing a two day delay, because of another launch. https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-7-astronaut-launch-delay-a...
Pretending that's relevant in assessing Starliner's multi-year delays is nutty.
The Crew-1 delays were not mentioned once in the article where Crew-1 actually launched - he just spent the article patting SpaceX on the back for saving NASA.
Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays. And speculating that Starliner may not even launch until after Crew-9, when Crew-8 isn't even announced, but will be mid 2024 at the earliest, and that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days, but "because of another launch" - that other launch being a SpaceX launch that was delayed.
However you spin it, this journalist has a near allergic avoidance of the word "delay" when it comes to SpaceX, and can't wait to spin Boeing delays into worst case scenarios that are entirely speculation. There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
The article about Boeing finally getting their crewed test done is in the future, so it's a little odd to be mad at a slight that hasn't yet happened.
> Now we have this delay but it's Boeing, and it's all about the delays.
Yes, the article about the delays is about the delays. Why is this surprising?
> that's before you realize that Crew-7 is delayed, yes by a few days
If you're going to point out two-day delays, Berger's pointing out two year delays seems eminently reasonable. When they eventually do fly crew, a "after years of delays and additional test flights at Boeing's expense" is probably warranted in the article.
> There's no way you can reasonably turn "we're going to talk to Boeing and announce an updated launch date" in July of 2023 and credibly say "it's entirely possible that Crew-9 will launch before it!"
The last Starliner delay was nine months long. Crew-9 beating the Boe CFT is entirely possible. SpaceX and Boeing both had their first orbital tests in 2019, but SpaceX has flown eight NASA crewed flights (and three commercial) since then to Boeing's zero.
One of these programs is currently troubled, the other has hit its goals and won extra contracted flights. You really can't wish these facts away, and a journalist would be goofy to ignore the difference.
> less than three weeks after discovery of issues
It has been much longer then 3 weeks.
> which is hilarious
Eric Berger has a very good track record when talking about delays. He usually has information from inside the industry. I'm gone go with they guy that has predicted correctly over and over and over again the last 10 years.
I don't really care if you think it's 'hilarious'.
Dragon is on regular cadence, short term delays of one doesn't necessarily even mean that the launches after that will be delayed to.
Yet SpaceX is still cheaper despite those damaged barges and craters. And that's really all there is to those, a cost element. It would be different if they had left smoking corpses but they haven't.
They do really do something right.
Partial mission success gets them a paycheck, but it would be interesting to look at their financials and see if they lost money on those missions.
The hubub is not about the few more months of delay just anounced.
The starliner and the dragon 2 started development around the same time to deliver about the same thing. The first crewed dragon 2 launched in 16 November 2020. It is not about the months of delay, but the years.
Anybody who is guaranteed a job with a decent salary for life and a great retirement plan is not incentivized to perform except by some personal drive. Anybody who wants onto the gravy train is motivated to do whatever work it takes to get a seat at that table. And they are motivated to do it as fast as possible.
It is not wrong to prioritize safety over speed. But you can use the safety excuse to drag things out for as long as people are willing to pay you without producing results. While space travel risks involve the obvious threat to human life, those risks can be generalized like any other risk. Usually, the lower the risk, the lower the reward. Unless there is something interfering. Interference that manipulates the risk/reward ratio often has the smell of corruption in the minds of many people.
“On September 16, 2014, NASA chose Boeing (Starliner) and SpaceX (Crew Dragon) as the two companies to be funded to develop systems to transport U.S. government crews to and from the International Space Station.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
The pad abort test resulted in a parachute not working - they forgot a pin. https://spacenews.com/missing-pin-blamed-for-boeing-pad-abor...
The first orbital test failed to reach the ISS because it accidentally burned too much propellant. A second error nearly made it burn up on reentry and had to be fixed in orbit.
The second orbital test failed to launch because the craft's valves couldn't handle humidity (despite being designed to launch from Florida). When it finally went (after a complete rebuild of those valves), multiple thrusters from two different systems failed in orbit.
The third orbital test - the first crewed - has been now indefinitely delayed.
It is well behind schedule.
They had an initial failure, and 1 delayed but successful mission. The 3rd mission is again delayed, that’s fairly normal for manned spacecraft. Rocket science is hard, news at 11…
And again, Starliner's third attempt is now indefinitely delayed for a rebuild of critical systems.
"largely delays in funding not just the actual program" is simply not the truth.
> is simply not the truth.
Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays, just using their initial announcement date let alone when funding was actually provided. That’s just simple math.
There's a major difference between internal tests intended to discover problems and "we think everything's good, NASA, can we send it to the ISS?" tests intended to show everything's working.
> Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays
Sure. Add on additional years worth of failed tests on the actual production vehicle and you get the $1.1B in the article. Boe-OFT was now nearly four years ago.
The entire point of spending that much money was to discover problems. As to your “sure” if admit Boeings delays are less than half of total delays, that sounds like you agree with me.
Anyway, Dragon 2 as an iteration of an existing platform was by far the lower risk option. But, that’s a completely separate question.
Plenty of things were updated like IDSS, but that’s an evolution of the old docking standard etc etc. But in the end the unmanned dragon 2 is using the same Falcon 9 rocket, on literally the same mission they even call it extended dragon in several places.
Vs. Boeing still has not finish assembling a Starliner capsule that meets NASA's safety spec's. Right now, "speculation" is saying that Boeing will ever successfully fly a Starliner mission.
Keep in mind that Boeing was awarded $4.2B, compared to $2.9B for SpaceX, for the same number of flights. Not to mention that NASA was accused of favor treatment for Boeing during the development phase - See What we found section of [0]
> Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
Such is an ignorant take. The rotation of ISS mission is currently 6 months, so there are always two missions a year, in the Spring and the Fall, barring extraordinary circumstance such as with Soyuz MS-10. Crew-8 will fly in the Spring, to be followed by the first Starliner operational flight. However if Starliner upcoming test flight continue to be delayed it's entirely possible that Crew 9 will fly instead.
> I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
It's not Ars' framing. It's common knowledge - [1], and reported by Boeing itself - [2]
Boeing on Wednesday reported a $257 million charge in the second quarter for its Starliner astronaut spacecraft program, bringing the program’s to-date overrun costs to $1.5 billion as delays continue.
The aerospace giant blamed the charge on its decision last month to indefinitely delay the first crewed Starliner launch.
> and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.
The article is very short. Everyone should read and judge for themselves. I think it's mostly matter of fact without sensational takes. Can't say the same about your post (horrific anti-Boeing/reeks/hilarious).
[0] - https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-005.pdf [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/26/boeing-has-lost-1point5-bill... [2] - https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2023-07-26-Boeing-Reports-Secon...
There is some pretty horrific anti-Boeing spin.
> Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time.
> Asked whether Starliner might be able to launch this year, Stich did not offer a concrete timetable. "We're not really ready to talk about a launch opportunity yet," he said. "We're going to work the technical issues first, and then we'll sit down with the Boeing team when the time is right and pick a launch target."
Reasonable and responsible as a response. However, Ars spins that response into:
> Such an answer suggests that Starliner's launch on an Atlas V rocket ... may very well slip into 2024.
I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"
But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:
> Given the ongoing delays, it is now possible that Crew-9 flies next fall, before Boeing's first operational mission, Starliner-1.
Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)
All 100% speculation. The "ongoing delays" in this context are "in June, Boeing announced that it would push back the July launch".
I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.
Ars (and its Space editor, Eric Berger, who has written books about SpaceX) are pretty heavy proponents of SpaceX (which I generally am too, despite being less enthusiastic about its leader), and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.