Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by Retric on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:43PM
(#36882812)
They were only different in how expensive they were to conduct. NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing all expected these tests to have a significant risks, which is why they where unmanned.
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.
Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by elteto on Thursday July 27, 2023 @12:07AM
(#36888782)
Dragon 2 is _not_ an iteration on Dragon 1. It’s a completely different vehicle and it was risky for SpaceX to go the route of developing a completely new vehicle. Yet they got it done, cheaper and faster.
Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by Retric on Thursday July 27, 2023 @10:18AM
(#36893947)
You can make that argument, but they share quite a bit of hardware and software.
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.
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.