The future of Boeing's crewed spaceflight program muddy after Starliner's return
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> The NASA officials at the press conference said they were confident that Boeing would continue despite losing at least $1.6 billion so far on the fixed-price contract and facing more losses amid investigations into the thruster failures on Starliner's latest flight. But there were no Boeing officials to ask. In the immediate aftermath of the landing, the company issued a short statement that included this noncommittal comment about its plans: "We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program."
From the article, it seems like the implication is that the program is under review from the Boeing side and not the Nasa side.
Boeing just seems to be really, really bad at this.
Boeing isn't contracted for results, it's contracted to disperse pork (aka jobs and money) across the districts of politicians who vote for earmarked NASA funds.
I’d love to have a viable national space program. The current program has helped advance us so much and an effective program would be a huge boon for society. However this $4b was clearly wasted, and we need to spend our money with companies that deliver results. I just wish there were more companies delivering on their promises in the space industry.
Unless you’re at the executive level, Boeing is “heads we win, tails you lose.”
Ultimately, it's what we collectively decided is more important.
This is why NASA has offices and hires manufacturing all over the country.
That's probably the reason why Boeing pulled him out of the press conference right there...
Or at least, realizing that saying it’s totally safe only to have the thing explode would cause irreparable reputational harm.
If only the development of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser wasn't moving at a snail's pace. (That project started back in 2004; they're currently hoping for the first test flight, of an unmanned cargo version, to happen in 2025.)
Boeing Starliner had no trouble launching, returning on the other hand was risky.
SLS worked flawlessly, but the returning Orion capsule's heat shield was severely damaged and the heat shield does not appear to be safe enough for crewed missions.
Starship's super heavy booster landed as planned, but the upper stage got damaged during re-entry and just barely managed to perform a landing.
STS/The space shuttle disaster was caused by damage from the launch, but arrived safely in LEO. The catastrophic loss occured during re-entry.
With both more time and vastly more money than Sierra, BO has yet to reach orbit with anything. Medium lift rockets are not particularly scarce...vs. there's only one decent non-Russian, non-Chinese manned orbital vehicle. And it took even SpaceX almost a decade to go from Cargo Dragon to Crew Dragon.
New Shepard, their suborbital demonstrator, had it’s first flight 9 years ago. They could quickly prove themselves, but such a long period in development without successful orbital launches destroyed the hype.
As to moon missions, building a capsule from scratch would take at least 5 years and more likely a decade plus a few billion dollars at this point. Putting another company in charge of Boeing’s operations could be viable, but having a 3rd party show up just doesn’t seem viable on any kind of reason timescale.
Crew Dragon in particular was overbuilt for LEO so that it can be used multiple times. While lunar re-entry is indeed possible, the vehicle wasn't designed for more than a one off mission.
The missing link is a low cost reusable crew vehicle designed for carrying people between LEO and NRHO/LLO. Basically a competitor to Orion.
While it is true in theory that a Starship could carry people to the moon and land them directly on the surface, the return trip isn't that easy and basically boils down to a second starship picking up astronauts from NRHO.
This is a good point. Not much is said about Blue Origin. Perhaps because they're overshadowed by SpaceX? But Bezos is launching rockets.
* Their New Glenn rocket is reusable and can launch 45 tons, focusing on the commercial satellite launch market. First launch in Spring of '25.
* New Shepard is more like a tourist transport, delivering passengers to the edge of space. They have completed 26 missions so far.
* They're working on Blue Moon, which is a lunar lander designed to be part of Nasa's Artemis program.
Here's a video of Bezos talking about (and showing) the first New Glenn rocket being prepared for launch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8SlfmpKM4
Disclaimer: I don't work for Bezos PR. I know very little about Blue Origin except what I learned from that video and what I got from ChatGPT.
They are usually ignored because they seem to be at least a decade away from any practical application, and kept being that decade away for at least the last entire decade. But if this changed, than yeah, people should stop ignoring it.
The rocket in the video I linked to is New Glenn (a heavy payload rocket) and its first launch will be in Spring 25
But 'reaching orbit' isn't really about height, its more about speed
But they didn't get the basics. Getting high up into space is much, much easier than reaching orbit. To the point it's a qualitatively different problem.