This is irrelevant here; the only people buying most of the products that Boeing makes are governments or airlines (many of which have government backing, because countries find it advantageous to have an airline). Without government, there's just no Boeing, or SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin, or Airbus, or...
The problem ultimately goes back to 1996 when Boeing was more-or-less taken over by McDonnell-Douglas management, and quality engineering took a back seat to quarterly results. Everything, from bad QA to "greasing the wheels" with lobbyists, ultimately goes back to someone with an MBA deciding that those behaviors were worth it for the stock price increase.
And to be fair, they were... until they weren't. But by then, the guy with the MBA has either left or divested, and it becomes someone else's problem.
SpaceX's success can be in a large part contributed to the fact that they don't have a bunch of retirement and pension funds demanding a chunk of the profits every quarter regardless of actual market space performance.
This fucking meme needs to die the unholy death it needed years ago.
1996 was 28 years ago. In that time Boeing has had the 777, 787, Delta IV Heavy, and whatever else.
The problem is far deeper than MuH mCdOnNeLl-dOuGlAs.
I'm not unconvinced that organizational rot in a slower moving company like Boeing took 3 decades to fully spoil the org.
Whatever the cancer is inside Boeing, it's far more entrenched and destructive than something we can just flippantly handwave away with "MuH mCdOnNeLl-dOuGlAs" every single fucking time.
It's also worth remembering that the F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Hornet, both still Boeing's most successful military products today, are McDonnell-Douglas products.
"MuH mCdOnNeLl-dOuGlAs" is a fucking waste of internet oxygen. It doesn't help explain anything, it doesn't help solve anything, it's not even that good at grabbing some internet points.
I believe there's also an element of "MBA bad, engineer good" resentment of management at play.
But the real truth is much more nuanced, no matter how satisfying it is to drop pithy one-liners about the MD merger.
It is also crazy to me that people speak as if Boeing is "falling apart", but managed to produce many successful models since the MD merger, including the amazing 787.
It was clear as day on the ground that something had switched, suddenly every conversation was about minimizing cost. Every meeting was about maximizing value. Efficiency above safety.
I cannot overemphasize that it really did fundamentally shift the language, the incentives, etc. I started having to prove I needed vms to two different business panels.
Sometimes you are right, the root cause is too simple, but I was there for this one. It really was that simple this time.
Dropping the McD one liner meme is neither thoughtful nor curious and it certainly doesn't explain anything.
It's like saying a McDonald's Big Mac is made of bread, beef, lettuce, and some mayonnaise like that's some conclusive end-all be-all. That's cool, but are we actually going to speak about something worth the time of day?
https://preview.redd.it/evolution-of-the-raptor-engine-by-v0...
A lot of defense and aerospace is not used to the Silicon Valley mindset. Gotta give Elon credit in achieving what he did with spacex
Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
I'm impressed you can keep saying this nonsense despite how SpaceX operates being pretty well documented.
Fortunately it seems that we also have quite a few wealthy people that actually want to use their money to fund and do new and innovative stuff.
Selection bias?
People who don't care about constantly accumulating more wealth than they need rarely end up obtaining it.
Sounds like china currently has zero rockets that are reusable
Not true, ArianeGroup has decided that reusability is the future with their Ariane Next program [0].
And ultimately that wasn't enough for safety.
But it's way less time/labor intensive than the shuttle.
I think you raise a good point even if there are some "technicalities" about it.
Real question: I'm not an aerospace geek. The term "first stage" has probably changed at lot in rocket science in the last 50 years. From the NASA Space Shuttle to SpaceX Falcon 9, has the definition changed? From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable, but you are definitely right that the Space Shuttle "thing" (no idea how to call it) was used over and over again, (somewhat) safely. Something that I don't know: Where Apollo programme capsules reusued? I assume no.
That's incorrect. The orange "giant center rocket" had no engines, it was an external tank which held the propellant burned by the orbiter's main engines. The SSMEs were on the "Shuttle thing" and were reused.
Apollo/Saturn had a much more traditional staging design where the first stage booster would run then drop off, then the second stage booster would run, then drop off, etc. There exist other rockets like the Atlas which had what they called a “stage and a half” design where the center stage burned for a long time and there was an outer “ring” stage that dropped off after a shorter time while the center stage kept going.
After going to the moon, the only part of the entire Apollo/Saturn rocket that came back was the command module capsule with the astronauts and moon rocks. These were completely torched and affected by salt water and were not designed to be reused. Reentry from the moon is significantly faster than reentry from low earth orbit.
The shuttle orbiters were refurbished and reused. It was a very difficult, expensive, and time consuming process to get an orbiter ready for another flight.
All of that is to say that the picture is blurry for the shuttle regarding first stage reusability. Yes the SRBs and orbiters were reused and were lit at launch. The ET was in use at launch but discarded. In my opinion it’s sort of not that interesting to argue what is and isn’t first stage on the shuttle because the elements just don’t map cleanly.
The design of the system with the SRBs, tank, and orbiters being adjacent to each other is considered by many to have been too dangerous in retrospect. This design was a factor in both shuttle disasters - the SRB shooting fire at the ET causing it to explode on Challenger and cracked foam falling away from the ET during launch and hitting the leading edge of the orbiter wing for Columbia. If they were stacked vertically rather than adjacent, those specific failure modes would not have been possible.
Each launch cost almost half a billion dollars in 2010 money. The Falcon 9 is reportedly $60-65M per launch.
SLS was just more of the same, welfare for all the states with contractors who grew fat and happy off the shuttle contracts. There was no technical argument whatsoever for reusing such ancient technologies.
Each RS25 engine cost $35M to refurbish for use in the SLS. For the cost of building TEN falcon 9 engines, NASA refurbished one RS25 engine.
And yes, of course it was absurdly dangerous to rely on not just one but two solid rocket motors of which there is no control whatsoever except for slight thrust vectoring...
My understanding of the federal government of the US is that it is mainly a subsidizer of their national military-industrial complex. Something I would call: military-industrial socialism.
With that said, it is just more of the same in a different era. 1930s and the Empire State Building: to re-invigorate the economy, Eisenhower and the interstate highway system: to provide a stronger national defense, etc
First stage needs to go through rigorous safety check in order to be re-certified for next flight thats what drives the cost up.
But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?
In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.
Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.
How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.
There’s people who would say any bigotry in government is wrong.
That doesn't explain why their civilian aircraft aren't just not the best product, but have gone completely to shit over the last decade or two. The 737 max is the most notorious example here, as it's their most recent development and has never been good from the start - but reporting suggests that the engineering on their formerly-good lines has been going downhill also, and it's only the fact that they started out as good products which means they've taken longer to fall as low.
And there's very little government revenue for the civilian aircraft design and manufacturing side of the business. It's all free market competition.
> gone completely to shit over the last decade or two
> Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation
My more thoughtful reply: I think "too big to fail" gets a bad rap on HN. In my view, for any sufficiently large country+economy, at some point, your top 3-5 defense contractors will be considered "too big to fail". No way around that. Depending upon the size of your country+economy, this is true for steel manuf also, but probably just the top 1-2.
Has anyone with great expertise in Boeing considered the effects of a break-up? I'm not sure why Boeing needs so many different industries under one roof -- space, civil, military, plus others.
I would speculate that when those got shaken out, (and likely some space contracts sniped away by SpaceX) Boeing did not make any adjustments for the revenue loss and simply tried to continue on their original bloated trajectory but instead cutting every corner possible along the way.
Government aquisition is a monopsony (market dynamic where there is one purchaser who wields all the power) which means "free market competition" doesn't exist. This causes lots of negative consequences. Here's a discussion of the topic in the context of defense but a lot of the same surely applies to space.
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/break-the-department-of-def...
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.
SpaceX (as of a year or two ago) was getting 45%+ of its funding from the US government.
And then there's the $900M in subsidies SpaceX asked for to provide rural internet access via starlink...
But it's a net benefit for the company
- Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
- They're the 4th biggest American defense contractor, so they're likely seen as vital for securing state power by many in the government.
- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Using Ockham's razor, here's my guess what happened: To get in this position in the first place, there will have been a fair bit of lobbying and "greasing the wheels" involved. Boeing eventually found themselves in a position where they got government contracts, no matter what. Leadership got complacent, they didn't really compete anymore because they didn't have to. This was when Musk came in and disrupted the space industry. But at that point, company culture was likely already too far down the drain for quick fixes. The situation would already be much worse for their space division, if not for the fact that they have such good relations with NASA and the government. NASA basically covered for them and played down the seriousness of the issues for weeks. And even now, they're not having SpaceX rescue the astronauts immediately, which would be even more embarrassing for Boeing. Instead they're bringing them back together with the already planned SpaceX Crew-9 flight next year. Boeing keeps getting away with black eyes, there aren't enough consequences despite all the serious issues.
¹ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/why-u...