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Comment by verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

    > This is probably the only way they'll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses.

As much as I get that Boeing is a major launch partner for the US in general and one of the only companies competing in the crewed space in the States right now, I don't get this part.

It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running. It's completely up to Boeing to produce a vehicle that can safely and reliably get crews to and from orbit, and to do the appropriate amount of testing beforehand. If they can't be bothered to do that with the understanding the cost of failure, that's on them.

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It certainly is part of NASA's job to consider long term space travel needs. And supporting a competitor to SpaceX now as a long term strategic benefit has a lot of value as opposed to being held hostage to monopoly pricing in the future.

Companies invest in their supply chain and invest in not being beholden to a single supplier (unless they control that supplier) all the time.

That feels completely like an excuse used after the fact to justify keeping Boeing around rather than a principled stance, considering that NASA and Congress were pretty set on just giving Boeing the sole source contract for crew transport to the station.

It's pretty well documented by Lori Garver, one of the people involved in pushing Commercial Crew, how strong the opposition was from both NASA and Congress.

At this point it'd probably be money better spent raising up a Blue Origin commercial crew program than propping up the corpse of Boeing.

Better for whom? Better for the involved Congresscritters, lobbyists, and Boeing? For all Bezos' wealth, I suspect he's behind the curve on his lobbying game.

Is Blue Origin anything more than a "Jeff Bezos wanted to personally fly in space" company?

If I had his wealth, "fly in space with William Shatner" would be on my todo list too.

For a while it was like that, but after the ex-Honeywell CEO was replaced, and with New Glenn flight hardware becoming increasingly more common to see being moved around and tested, they do seem to be approaching being a serious space company.

Blue Origin is older than SpaceX, and is proof that infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:

>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.

Surely we can agree though, that given Boeing's recent track record and how they've handled calls for improved processes, combined with NASA's typical standard of safety and care, they aren't a good strategic long-term choice, right?

Like, I understand what you're saying here, and I agree -- if the US wants to have serious private-sector competition in the space sector, that's arguably a good thing. SpaceX's advances in reducing launch costs by implementing launch vehicle reusability to a degree that was never seriously approached before are objectively a good thing for the sector. Some of the work Firefly appears to be doing is really interesting, and could lower the cost of much of the work around launches substantially. Blue Origin also exists and may at some point be more than a billionaire's vanity project.

Boeing isn't the only competitor in this space, and some of the smaller companies are hungrier. They're actively innovating, and because their existence is on the line, they do the work to make sure their projects are beyond reproach by the time they're picking up NASA work or sending people into orbit (usually with a pretty high degree of success).

I mean, Boeing is certainly a good strategic long-term choice today for an alternative because they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit. If you are saying that a different company should have been chosen 10 years ago, that's different. If you're saying that NASA should also invest in smaller companies, possibly.

    > they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit

This is currently, actively, under question.

I'm sticking to my guns here -- Boeing and NASA being in this position is not an excuse to go easy on them, cut corners, or otherwise lower any standards. If the US wants to use taxpayer money to prop up the crewed spaceflight sector (which I would agree with in principle despite it not being my tax dollars -- this is IMO an investment in the future and a way to stay competitive on the world stage), then they should reevaluate their approach to a public sector crewed spaceflight option where fewer parts of the process are profit driven.

SLS was a flop but that doesn't mean that the next thing has to be, and while public spaceflight projects absolutely do subcontract work out when it comes to building components, there are big, traditionally-expensive parts of the project that can be offloaded to public agencies where profit isn't a consideration.

If NASA, and more importantly its budgetary oversight (congress) sufficiently values an additional supply chain, it can invest more money in additional tests to get that additional supply chain.

If the value of the additional supply chain does not justify paying more, they can let boeing pay out of their own pocket, or let them drop out. The whole reason Boeing was given a fixed price contract at the beginning was so that this option could be exercised.

Lowering the bar is not making an investment.

It would probably be cheaper still for nasa to employ all of starliners engineers outright, sans management and shareholder profit making. Plus they’d have their own in house rocket design arm building stuff at cost.

NASA has been held hostage to monopoly pricing it's entire history until SpaceX came along lol. Sometimes you have to let the rot die away and let something new take its place. Boeing needs to be broken up, shaken down, and cut to a lean modern family of companies.

But no one can compete..

> It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running.

In theory it is not. The reality is that a lot of NASA's budgeting and decisions are made based on the pork-barrel politics of the ones who hold the purse strings -- congress.

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