Headline makes it sound like it's intentional, like Boeing knows the moon's haunted and wants to prevent people from going.
Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.
They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.
The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!
To paraphrase the investigators of the average Boeing airliner crash: "A trained pilot would not have been able to regain control in the required time"
Well, we have new CEO, Kelly Ortberg who started Aug 8th, to give it a go.
It looks like they are having a go at correcting some of their more noted flaws - he's an engineer and is going to run things from Seattle. Good luck to him!
Yeah like that'll make any difference. They've had a bean counter in charge for the past 4 years, and another engineer before that who was fired over the 737 Max fiasco.
"CEO changes will continue until morale improves"?
> Originally, the EUS was allocated a budget of $962 million and intended to fly on Artemis II, which in January was pushed to no earlier than September 2025. But by the OIG’s estimate, EUS costs are expected to balloon to $2 billion through 2025 and reach $2.8 billion by the time Artemis IV lifts off in 2028.
Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.
Exactly - all the anti-Boeing sentiment in the comments here (while deserved) should also be directing some ire at the funding and contract structures being used for these projects (I.e. “cost-plus” contracts).
They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.
(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)
The "left with nothing" fear is unfounded. All of their assets would be bought up by investors seeking to do the same thing but the right way; a factory has value and somebody will want it.
Perhaps. But now imagine trying to be the politician(s) selling the "let'em die" idea. Most voters will be thinking, "What if my company is next to go?" and will vote accordingly. Thus there are few very politicians willing to take the high road.
I do not know the details of their contracts, but assuming these are cost-plus contracts then it may be fair to equate structural dysfunction to intent.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Defense contractors extract money from the government, they are not here to enable space travel, they are here to move money from other people's pockets to their own. Any other actions are purely ancillary. And if they can get the money without delivering any result at all, why, they're fine with that.
> The purpose of a system is what it does. Defense contractors extract money from the government, they are not here to enable space travel, they are here to move money from other people's pockets to their own. Any other actions are purely ancillary. And if they can get the money without delivering any result at all, why, they're fine with that.
This is part of the reason why the new era of firm, fixed price contracts at NASA is so important. And why it's so troubling that NASA is having difficulty transitioning SLS contractors to such contracts for later (Artemis V+) rockets.
That sounds good, until it leaves NASA entirely dependent on SpaceX as a single supplier. For better or worse, there don't seem to be any other companies (old or new) that are able to successfully execute on huge fixed-price contracts.
> For better or worse, there don't seem to be any other companies (old or new) that are able to successfully execute on huge fixed-price contracts.
Northrup Grumman seems to be doing a pretty good job with Cygnus. And ULA seems to be doing alright with NSSLv2 (although it sounds like they may have had to give up a launch or two due to Vulcan delays).
Stoke Space also has a pretty huge rocket nerd at the helm[1]. And of course there's Blue Origin (even though they seem to be taking forever). The industry has been flourishing lately, though (with the possible exception of Blue Origin) it'll be a long time before these younger companies produce anything capable of rivaling Falcon 9, let alone Starship.
> And of course there's Blue Origin (even though they seem to be taking forever)
Ever since Bezos installed David Limp as CEO, it seems like they've been able to ship stuff. It's hard to know if he was set up for success by his predecessor, but their older no press policy prevented anyone from knowing it, or if he changed the company culture for the better.
Regardless, it appears like Blue Origin is likely to launch New Glenn this year. Or, at least the DoD thinks it's likely enough that they agreed to onramp Blue Origin to NSSLv3 (pending a successful launch).
> it'll be a long time before these younger companies produce anything capable of rivaling Falcon 9
I don't think it'll be that long.
* Blue Origin's New Glenn should launch in 2024-2025.
* RocketLab's Neutron should launch in 2025-2027.
* Relativity's Terran R should launch in 2026-2028.
That's remarkably soon.
Of course, as you point out, Starship should be operational quite soon. It'll be exciting to see how things shake out.
My personal opinion is that SpaceX will move to payload based pricing, somewhat akin to their current rideshare pricing. I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, but something like $10m + $3m/tonne. That way they can compete for smaller payloads while also being paid appropriately for launching really heavy stuff. However it ends up, I'm sure pricing will be heavily influenced by the competition when it comes out.
It sounds like you agree that Boeing is failing to adopt to fixed cost?
Just from pop culture, isn't starliner that thing that leaves people stranded for a year after making them shed "excess" baggage for a supposedly weeklong(?) trip?
> Boeing has lost more than $1.5 billion in budget overruns on the Starliner project which has been marred by delays, management issues and engineering challenges. The price paid per flight has also drawn criticism from NASA's inspector general and from observers who point to significantly lower costs on the competing Crew Dragon.
It only reads that way if you're being very very generous and have lived under a rock for the past few years so that you've not seen any other information about Boeing.
I usually despise stack rank, but it looks like there are times when it's needed. Maybe companies should mostly eschew it for other methods, but run it once per decade and flush out all the dead weight, of course, including management.
The problem is that stack ranking rewards the political actors and not people who heads down focus on their work. This is especially true when the organization has already been taken over by the parasites.
I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.
It is, but it may be periodically necessary to get rid of dead weight and extirpate those who’ve risen to their level of incompetence.
I'm not advocating stack ranking for yearly review but rather a quintennial or decennial event to clean-house. In other words, a mechanism to avoid what happened to Boeing, Intel, Yahoo, and what is happening to Google and others.
360 reviews obviously allows orgs to get fat and carry bloat.
I agree with you on the importance and necessity of getting rid of dead weight.
All I'm saying is that stack ranking might not successfully get rid of dead weight. As with any system of metrics, the people who game the system are the ones who reap benefits from the system - thereby subverting the system, and preventing it from achieving its stated goals. As systems of its kind go, stack ranking is particularly insidious and gameable.
I have no idea what _would_ work, though. I have some half-baked thoughts, but will reserve them until such time as they are better than half-baked.
Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.