The fact that none of the other space startups prior to SpaceX, which had access to more resources, succeeded? Same goes with Tesla. You have to really stretch believability to argue that the one factor in common between two companies which broke into extremely hard to break into industries and ushered in paradigm shifts, happened to do so for no reason related to that common factor, let alone arguing that they did so in-spite of that common factor.
We also have pretty detailed books on the history of SpaceX, written from employee interviews, which also indicate that Musk is fairly hands on. There's also this tweet from the designer of the Merlin rocket engine that is usually thrown around when these kinds of claims are made: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/15am9pl/t...
This is probably one of the better run parts of Artemis, considering that it's a fixed price milestone-based contract awarded after NASA realized they were getting nowhere on their own suit after spending 13 years working on them, with the OIG predicting each of those original suits would cost $500M with the way they were going.
The least value for money parts are pretty much entirely SLS related, with most of them involving blank checks handed out to legacy contractors with no real consequences for poor performance.
I don't get how this is so hard to understand (in general, so many people seem to be reading this completely backwards).
Previously, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, Y can't see X's posts.
Now, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, but Y can see X's posts.
The new system changes nothing in terms of what the person doing the blocking experiences. It fixes abuses of the previous block system, where scammers, grifters and impersonators hide behind blocks to reduce the chances of being caught. It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target on a platform that has free accounts and the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts.
Apple's policy is that apps must have "The ability to block abusive users from the service." They don't say that users should be able to block other users from seeing their posts. In fact, this is also how blocks work on other platforms like Discord. If I block a user, I don't see their posts unless I click on them, they can see mine, but they can't directly ping or reply to me. Similarly with Reddit, being blocked from a subreddit makes me unable to interact with it, but lets me continue to view it.
> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target.
I would have made the opposite move, adding an option for paying customers to be invisible to logged out users.
We will see how it goes, but unless you add a rule to prevent people to screenshot tweets from people who blocked them and sharing that picture to their followers, I don't see how the changes are more improvements than regression.
And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care about this change, the two person I know that were harassed on Twitter aren't using it anymore, so :/
Hopefully the platform improve thanks to this change :D
To me, this is an improvement. I don't care about the thing about preventing people from screenshot-ing tweets, since the barrier was so low it was happening often anyway. But, I've seen many cases of accounts being impersonated and used for scams, where the impersonated user only finds out after the damage has already been done. E.g. you sell commissions for something, impersonator makes an account, blocks you so you can't see him, then tricks potential customers into sending him money. You only piece things together weeks later when those customers start calling you out for running off with their money. Another variation involves someone commissioning something, then blocking when their order is ready as a way to harass the creator.
Can they subscribe to Y’s posts? (I mean, without creating another account.)
More generally, though, I agree. Twitter’s aggressive spamming of nearly every page with irrelevant posts (for example, the replies page) is a better reason to switch.
Seems to be unclear, apparently X doesn't do auto-unsubscribes, so you'd still be charged for the subscription. Previously it'd tell you that you can't access subscriber content anymore, but it isn't clear if that's still the case.
Plus, back when Musk and Bezos entered aerospace, a common joke was "how do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start as a billionaire!", SpaceX was the exception to the trend, and had fewer resources than even other previous space startups.
Part of the reason NASA was so doubtful of SpaceX at first was that they had previously heavily supported other space startups, only for them to fail to deliver.
Arguing that SpaceX is hoarding all the talent is also funny when considering that many other space startups are by ex-SpaceX employees, and SpaceX is often described as having a high churn rate.
Nope, Starliner is not designed to go beyond low Earth orbit. You might be thinking of the commercial space stations intended to replace the ISS, where, yes, Starliner was proposed as the crew transport for Blue Origin's station.
>In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who lived on the island of Ogygia, where, according to Homer's Odyssey, she detained Odysseus for seven years against his will. She promised Odysseus immortality if he would stay with her, but Odysseus preferred to return home. Eventually, after the intervention of the other gods, Calypso was forced to let Odysseus go.
There's also the fact that companies like Boeing have grown fat off of blank check contracts from the government, such that they are no longer capable of doing the job.
Boeing has already openly stated that they won't bid on fixed price contracts anymore, and lately we have all sorts of other damning information like how repairs for the ground support systems for SLS are running so late they might cause Artemis 2 to be delayed further, while SpaceX effectively nuked their launch pad last year and was ready to fly, with upgrades, just 6 months later.
Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now.
For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.
They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.
I'm confused about your "no" here. The comment to which you're replying is clarifying misleading wording, but your comment is an opinion on what should happen.
Since apparently I'm being misunderstood: the comment wasn't "clarifying" anything, it was only attempting to re-impose euphemistic and deceptive PR language.
Everyone knows Starliner is as good as dead. It's what Boeing wants even, since Starliner is a huge money pit.
The only ones propping up this continued "delay" fiction are the NASA and Boeing PR departments.
I agree with you, but also worth noting that NASA paid Boeing 4.6B to build it with the expectation that it can be used. There is a “sink cost” issue here, but realistically that’s on Boeing not NASA. They should at least elbow Boeing into fixing it.
Letting Boeing walk away from a fixed price contract because they screwed up is going to lead to lots of future low-ball fixed-price “whoops, sorry” issues. Plusfrom an engineering standpoint, Boeing should fix it to prove their competency for future contracts
> No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.
There is an important point here that needs to be emphasized. To fix starliner you need to build up personnel familiar with construction, operations, and build/test enough hardware to iterate kinks. This requires investment that Boeing being a publicly traded company cannot do for free (or they will get sued) and NASA is unlikely to pay them to do it. So this is catch 22, they will fix current issues, but given how long it will take, there is a high chance of causing new issues due to loss of essential personnel who would know how to integrate fixes with existing design constraints... so unfortunately charade characterization fits.
Investing back into yourself is generally true, but only under healthy economic conditions. Boeing exists in a really weird place of being "too big to fail" (ie a monopoly) where investing money into personnel and improved processes is actually wasteful towards the shareholders because it isn't necessary to maintain the core business.
Looks like that mentality is exactly what caused them to lose out to SpaceX. They thought they were the monopoly and now find themselves out of the picture.
Same mentality with their civil aviation business. Their failure to invest in the core of the company (making great planes) has led to spectacular - and deadly - failure.
The main reason they are still an important player in civil aviation is because Airbus can't make planes fast enough.
Boeing is only too big to fail in the business of building passenger airliners. Maybe there is some strategic interest in keeping their defence arm afloat. But their space business is subject to market forces. There are plenty of players willing and able to replace Boeing in that specific industry.
Boeing is clearly a company in the death spiral stage of institutional decline. It happens to most institutions, unfortunately, and it will probably happen to spacex one day.
That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.
Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.
I think Boeing is an object lesson in what happens when you have an MBA without an engineering background run a company whose product is cutting edge engineering.
You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center.
So,
You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc.
All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering.
So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects.
At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.
Starliner works. It had a minor issue that turned out not to be so serious. It just happens to obscenely expensive.
There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done.
Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?
There has been one, a second stage that failed to relight the engine due to a sensor issue that was quickly fixed. Since then they have had more successful launches than most companies fly in entire years. The other failures were:
- A booster that failed to land after the most flights any booster in the fleet has had, a problem only SpaceX is capable of having right now
- A second stage where the engine shutdown during a deorbit burn was a few milliseconds later than expected.
On the other hand, the "minor issue" on Starliner had Boeing burning hundreds of millions of dollars trying to replicate the issue on the ground, after so many years of waterfall-style development.
People forget that on Apollo 13s return there was a legitimate concern that the explosion had damaged the heat shield and the fear was it would fail and the craft would melt and break up entirely during deorbit.
Due to their nature they're sensitive and easy to compromise. Which is also why NASA knew from day 1 that icing was going to be a huge issue on the shuttle. They were retrofitting the vehicle, the launch platform and even the software to reduce heat shield risks very early on.
Some of their earliest flights included EVA experiments where the astronauts translated themselves to the thermal tiles, did inspections, and even did mock repairs to test the feasibility of the idea and of the quality of the adhesives in near total vacuum.
After the final accident they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm, swung "underneath" the shuttle, and used to take a comprehensive survey of the thermal management system immediately on orbit.
In any case, point is, human rated space flight will always require this level of attention to detail and ongoing effort to derisk every possible aspect of every mission performed. NASA management did an outright terrible job at this. From incentivizing the wrong behavior, falling in love with paper targets, and completely failing to audit their own internal risk estimations for errors.
> they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm,
First shuttle launch, Columbia STS-1 12 April 1981.[0]
The Canadarm was first tested in orbit in 1981, on Space Shuttle Columbia's STS-2 mission [1] (12 November 1981)
It was always intended to be on the shuttle. It's not as if they conceived, designed, and then created it between STS-1 and STS-2. It was baked into the software and into the rear flight deck controls. It was late.
Launching a prototype rocket with the expectation that it will probably blow up and then having it blow up isn't a failure, especially when the goal is to see what happens.
You said "unexpected catastrophic explosive failures". But
1. They were not unexpected. They very very clearly communicated months ahead.
2. "Catastrophic" is a bit much too, as they were indeed expected and planned for. In fact, the biggest failure in the Starship development was that the rocket did NOT explode fast enough once.
3. "Failures". Well.. no. These are prototypes intended to learn from. Experiments if you will. A scientist that never has a negative result is a fraud. Same here.
> It had a minor issue that turned out not to be so serious.
We don't know if it was serious or not. If Starliner managed to land this time, will it be able to do it repeatedly, or it was just luck this time?
If we are trying to deduce seriousness of the issue from data, then one point of data is too low. Boeing needs to launch a few dozens more of test flights to gather the data needed for this kind of reasoning. But if we are relying on causal reasoning, then we have no clear understanding of causes, Boeing engineers are still unable to explain how their thrusters fail exactly, and what they could do to make them robust.
>Boeing needs to launch a few dozens more of test flights to gather the data needed for this kind of reasoning.
This in fact is a shining vindication of Musk's "Waste metal, not time." philosophy.
Boeing is operating in the old school "Spend lots of time planning, go for a hole in one." philosophy, so if they proceed to fail they need to spend lots of more time planning and going for more hole in ones to demonstrate sufficient statistics.
SpaceX? They wasted metal instead of time and got statistics out with sheer numbers before Boeing even got a number, because the only way you get numbers is by getting numbers.
Boeing should be fired and ideally bankrupted, and everyone else needs to get with the times so they don't become the next Boeing.
No, the Soviets lost simply because we wasted more metal than they did.
Consider that just the Apollo programme had twenty one (21) launches in a span of about just 8 years before Apollo 11 landed the first men on the Moon.
Gemini had twelve (12) launches in a span of just 2 years, and Mercury had twenty six (26) launches in a span of just 4 years.
Contrast 4 launches of N1, 6 launches of Voskhod, and 13 launches of Vostok from records we know of.
Boeing also deleted a lot of software code they deemed not necessary despite being a hard requirement. They also shouldn't had an issue to the point that NASA lost confidence in Boeing.
We all make mistakes, but some mistakes are being made due to shoddy work. It was thankfully not a capsule destroying mistake, but on something high stake such as a human rated capsule, shoddy works shouldn't be tolerated, especially with corner cutting such as removing entire capability in software.
I’m curious if they would use the same logic for russian roulette. If you spin the barrel with one bullet, pull the trigger against your head and survive does that mean that the danger wasn’t that serious?
NASA wasn’t saying that they know for certain that the Starliner will have a catastrophe on the way back. What they said is that they cannot be certain that the probability of it having a catastrophe is lower than some decision threshold.
Using the russian roulette as an analogy NASA has a revolver with a barel for a million bullets, and they decided they are fine to pull the trigger against the astronauts heads if there are less than 5 bullets in it. But due to nobody really understanding the mechanism of previous anomalies they don’t know how many bullets there are in the barrel. There might be six or more so they are not willing to pull the trigger. (The number of bullets, and the number of chambers is merelly illustrative. I don’t know what is the real number NASA uses.)
Thank you! It seems wikipedia confirms what you are saying. Sadly the article it references is no longer available, so i can’t dig into it. But it sounds 1/270 is for the requirement for overall mission while the ascent and descent phases have 1/500 apportioned to them each.
Was trying to put this 1/500 number into perspective for myself. It sounds like it is rougly similar to the mortality of having appendicites. [1]
It still had problems during the return flight, i.e. additional unexpected component malfunctions, but not serious enough to prevent a successful return.
Therefore the decision to not use it until the causes for all such malfunctions are understood was completely justified.
Problem: "one of the Starliner’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters did not function".
Why it was not serious: "there are plenty of backup RCS thrusters".
Even if the redundancy ensured a successful return, the causes must be understood, because otherwise at a future return more than one thruster could malfunction and the redundancy may be insufficient.
what about that bezos company, blue origin, wouldnt they be a viable competitor? they seem to know what theyre doing and dont share the incompetence of boeing or the comedy of spacex.
As long as there's competition, it is fine. Boeing fits at least that role easily. Plus, they've built the vehicle with no drama and without purchasing Twitter in the middle. This is worth something.
We see similar situation in automotive. Other companies do allow to keep Tesla in check, so there's less opportunity to force "Cybertrucks" onto the market as the only option.
No, they don’t. Starliner is a paper competitor. The money NASA sends it ensure SpaceX maintains a practical monopoly.
Boeing is the “competitor” everyone wishes for. Sucking up the oxygen in the room a real competitor might need while doing absolutely nothing to contest your market share.
> they've built the vehicle with no drama
Late to launch, billions over budget and strands its astronauts but has a CEO you can’t remember because their planes kept falling apart is a weird way to spell “no drama.”
One of the benefits of the commercial crew program was supposed to be that NASA would just be one customer of many, thus justifying why the company takes on the risk of making a fixed price bid.
Starliner does not even attempt to compete on the commercial market, it has a fixed number of Atlas V's stored away for the NASA contract, and then someone will have to cough up money to try to put it on another rocket.
So, they aren't even in the market, let alone doing anything to even appear to compete.
The only positive thing I can say about his purchase of Twitter was that it finally stopped me wasting time on the site.
Despite Musk's… what, breakdown? Radicalisation? Temper tantrums? Whatever that is, SpaceX is still astoundingly fast at both launching stuff to orbit and also making new and better rockets than almost everyone else on the planet combined.
I'd like to see the money that was given to Boeing, instead given to another space startup that might do something interesting.
You can just say "he has a few different opinions than my peer group" and leave it at that. Heck, you yourself can even form your own opinions -- it's fine -- don't look so aghast.
Different opinions is not the problem. My own opinions differ plenty from my peers. Even that the opinions are outside my Overton Window isn't itself a problem, because (as with most of my nationality) that window excludes the 2nd Amendment and yet I can be here on this American website.
Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like defections in the IPD sense.
I put spreading conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines (this week), plots by Jews, vaccines caused Lebron James' son to pass out, Paul Pelosi's attacker was actually his gay lover, etc in a different category than "he has a few different opinions than my peer group". Something has gone terribly wrong.
I don't think he's actually as dumb as that, he is just playing the same counter-intelligence game as other people on the right, because telling the truth isn't as advantageous for them.
People buying into that stuff are morons, but useful to the republican party all the same.
Stoke Space looks really interesting. Everyday Astronaut visited a year ago and got a tour of their test facilities and rocket design, which is really innovative and aiming for full rapid reusability. Their development approach is similar to SpaceX's.
I have a feeling that Gwynne Shotwell has basically told Elon to stay away from everyday operations. He's demonstrably unstable at this point, and SpaceX operations are too life-threatening to have Elon be more than a figure-head and financier at this point.
Could be, you're certainly not the only one with that vibe.
If so, she's a miracle worker given all the rest of what we're seeing.
That said, the way he talks about the rockets? Sure, he's ambitious, but he does seem to act like he recognises the laws of physics don't respond to "screw the rules I have money".
He's away from everyday operations, but he is most definitely the actual chief engineer of Starship - the one with final word, not necessarily the one doing all the work.
SpaceX hasn’t had much competition for years now and they just pulled off catching the largest booster in history like a pair of chopsticks. I don’t think competition is what is motivating them.
Exactly. They're motivated by reducing dollars per kg of payload. They have their own agenda for a Mars mission, and they'll build a business taking third party gigs to fund their long term mission to get people to Mars.
Who can tell? Musk has gone full Kanye at this point. He still has intelligence, but years of people telling him he's the most talented person on the earth have led to a downward spiral of egomania and lack of self awareness. I don't think anyone can guess his motivations at this point.
Musk made his goals for SpaceX well known from the beginning, has for decades maintained that was his goals and his actions with SpaceX are all consistent with those goals.
Long term probably yes. Once it becomes a monopoly (I guess it already is really) but if it is one for too long it will get just as sloppy as Boeing. Remember Boeing used to actually be good.
I doubt Boeing could ever be that competition though.
If there is no competition to a corp, consider the option of nationalizing it. Suddenly the prospect of being without competition will look far less desireable to them.
I guess that would make sense if the company without competition had a stranglehold on the industry and was taking part in anticompetitive behaviour to build a moat around themselves but as far as I know Space X isn’t doing this?
What would you expect them to do differently under this proposed scenario?
Would think that timeline is more likely to be extended than shortened. There will be successor missions, and other space use cases for which derivatives of an astronaut transfer vehicle have value.
The bigger question will be whether it's better for Boeing to take the relatively low cost option of fixing the propulsion system which to some extent is their third party supplier's issue, in a funding environment where operating actual missions is more favourably funded than R&D, or whether that's sunk cost fallacy when SpaceX is clearly ahead of them.
It probably won't be extended, but there isn't no reason for people to think otherwise. It has been extended in the past, and NASA's own white paper from this year says that extension is a possibility if there are no commercial LEO stations suitable to NASA by 2030 and if Russia agrees to continue their participation. This is despite the contract for the Deorbit Vehicle already being awarded to SpaceX; it would simply wait until later.
> there isn't no reason for people to think otherwise
It’s possible, not probable.
It would take an act of the Congress to keep the ISS funded. There is zero indication that status quo will change nor a strong constituency for changing it.
This basically. Either there's a functional commercial replacement which is theoretically also a use case for a properly functioning Starliner or the ISS gets extended. Plausibly both. It doesn't have a fixed life limit, hasn't stopped working, hasn't stopped being used for experiments, and a commercial space boom era when microgravity experiments started turning into businesses would be a weird time for the US to decide it was a waste of money and give the space station monopoly to China...
The ISS may not, but Starliner does have a fixed life. It is meant to fly on the Atlas V, which is end-of-life. Once those are gone Starliner would need to be integrated and recertified to fly on a new rocket, probably Vulcan, but it's doubtful Boeing would want to spend the money to do this.
In response to your other point, I am very skeptical of microgravity experiments becoming a big industry. I think NASA (as an organization, I'm not talking about individuals in NASA) is mostly interested in continuing human space flight simply because it keeps the public interested in space, which makes NASA's funding more secure.
I often mention to people that graduate research helped me mature for this same reason. Prior to grad school, I just followed the strict well-defined path modern schooling tends to have - spend most time studying, very limited investment in hobbies and out-of-school friendships, get good grades, focus only on moving to the next year. My grades were great, but it left me as an underdeveloped anxious mess of a person who was incapable of being independent.
Having a few years where I had to do things mostly on my own while still being somewhat 'sheltered' (because a research advisor doesn't have time to babysit, but also won't exploit you the way an employer can) helped me a lot to become my own person and to stop having panic attacks over trivial decisions. At a younger age, the same effect could've been achieved with one year.
Plus, while everyone used to act like missing a year of ~high school would be a permanent blemish on a career, having gone through all this education, I feel that high school was the least consequential part of it. It could easily be replaced with a year of professional 'exploration' with no loss. Especially nowadays, where undergraduate degrees are very common (high school grades can already be entirely forgotten after obtaining a degree), and undergrad programs spend much of the first year redoing a lot of high school material to bring everyone up to the same level.
As a result, when I have children of my own, I plan to emphasize this sort of exploration a lot more.
> but also won't exploit you the way an employer can
Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
And then when you do graduate, forget a career in research if you can't get recommendation letters from him.
But otherwise, I agree. A ton of benefits if you go to graduate school and don't have an abusive advisor.
(I also took a year off after high school. Never understood why everyone said I was making a big mistake...).
>Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
>I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
That's kind of what I mean though. In grad school other professors you've worked with might still keep an eye out for you. Under an exploitative employer, the way I was previously, I wouldn't know any better, I had no sense for the value of my time/work and I used to panic about having to send simple emails to people, quitting a job used to sound equivalent to suicide.
For me there's also the factor that as an international student, it's a lot easier for employers to exploit me than a school.
Edit: Although, come to think of it, I do know of other departments at my uni where even other professors can't be relied on to help in such cases. So I guess you're right.
> Under an exploitative employer, the way I was previously, I wouldn't know any better, I had no sense for the value of my time/work and I used to panic about having to send simple emails to people, quitting a job used to sound equivalent to suicide.
Seems the lessons you learned as a grad student are the lessons I learned as an employee :-)
My first job was exploitative. I eventually gave them the middle finger and left. Everyone told me I was crazy: "All jobs are like this. You have to suck it up"
Eh, no. None of my jobs since then have been that bad. Half of them I actually enjoyed.
We also have pretty detailed books on the history of SpaceX, written from employee interviews, which also indicate that Musk is fairly hands on. There's also this tweet from the designer of the Merlin rocket engine that is usually thrown around when these kinds of claims are made: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/15am9pl/t...