NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1827393397939634503

by ripjaygn • 2 years ago

578 640 2 years ago

twitter.com

ripjaygn2• 2 years ago

Starliner will try to return uncrewed back to earth.

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

Knowing Boeing, possibly unscrewed too, haha.

fuzzfactor• 2 years ago

That's going to be a lot of miles on a self-driving vehicle.

But if there are no further incidents it may not end up with such a bad Carfax after all ;)

nullhole• 2 years ago

Article on nasa.gov:

"NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew"

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...

@dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current one?

GeekyBear• 2 years ago

Isn't the question of how the astronauts will get back the real story here?

diggan7• 2 years ago

The option was between Starliner or Crew-9, so not using Starliner means they'll use Crew-9.

belter3• 2 years ago

And also, do they have a way to evacuate right now in case of emergency?

gitfan862• 2 years ago

The highest quality and most up to date source is EricBerger on X https://x.com/SciGuySpace

_Microft• 2 years ago

He’s also covering space topics for Ars Technica and you can certainly expect an article on this in the next few days.

This one is from yesterday, maybe it will receive an update? https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/as-nasa-nears-major-de...

dylan60410• 2 years ago

More up to date than the actual press conference currently ongoing linked else where in the thread?

NavinF4• 2 years ago

No, that NASA article is mostly fluff. The original link to the ongoing press conference and Eric Berger's summary of it (https://x.com/SciGuySpace) are better.

roughly4• 2 years ago

If we're going to keep Boeing around because it's in the national security interest to have an American airplane manufacturer, we need to either nationalize it, break it up, or remove the entire leadership class. The company exists at this point for the same reason that Chase bank does: because they cannot fail, because we will not let them. The market structure will not work for this company, at least not the way corporate management is done in 2024, and if I'm the Air Force or any other branch of the US military reliant on Boeing goods, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about my supply of Boeing parts, planes, and armaments right now.

alphabettsy• 2 years ago

What’s the issue with Chase Bank and leadership that’s similar to Boeing?

roughly4• 2 years ago

Nothing I'm aware of with Chase's leadership, but they're the largest bank in the US by far by AUM, and that's because they've been the partner of choice for the FDIC & regulators looking to rescue distressed banks. In other words, they're a private corporation being used to fill a role the government deems essential, and consequently probably the safest place on earth to put your money right now, at least with regards to the risk of a bank failure.

(As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of role.)

misiti37805• 2 years ago

100% agree.

AnonMO2• 2 years ago

a better bank would have been Wells Fargo. Chase and JPM are not in the same category they are profit machines with great balance sheets. that's why they swooped in last year during the bank crisis and took over some banks.

dylan60410• 2 years ago

Wells Fargo is a better example of criminal vs negligent. Has Boeing verged into criminal? It's not like they were continuously bilking the gov't for all of this, which to me keeps them out of criminal. but of course, IANAL

roughly4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I'm mostly referring to Chase's relationship with the Fed, FDIC, and regulators - they're clearly the bank of choice for rescuing distressed banks, and they're the largest bank in the country by a pretty substantial margin.

You're right about the difference, though - they're stable, well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.

If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a different story, but I think there's been a clear decision made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing yet.

protastus• 2 years ago

This company needs to be audited, starting at the top. Once a business is considered critical for natural security (Boeing is certainly in this category), it has an obligation to deliver with quality and on time. Boeing is failing and needs recovery.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

We should just go ahead and admit that Boeing is a government company, and that's what it takes to be one of the big-3 global commercial aircraft manufacturers these days (Boeing, Airbus, Comac).

Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace everyone.

Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board representation.

Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad company, but make any employee shareholders who are still employed whole ($1 per $1).

roughly4• 2 years ago

Yup. There's no market pressure of note on Boeing, otherwise they'd be even the slightest bit concerned that their planes are falling out of the sky. They exist to turn government contracts into stock buybacks.

sgc2• 2 years ago

Breaking Boeing up would make it ineffective and likely lead to its failure. You could maybe spin off a couple small divisions, but not more than that. Nationalization is a non-starter in the US - not worth wasting the time and effort to try to make it happen. The only real option is to remove the current leadership, and place the company into Conservatorship to force the new leadership to do the right thing - ideally for at least 10 years, but 5 to 7 years would be the more likely political outcome of such a move.

I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long term, would get on board with this option.

At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe space from which to spread throughout the organization.

icegreentea23• 2 years ago

It's not clear to me that splitting up Boeing in commercial+business jet, defense, and space would make it more ineffective than its current incarnation? Boeing's ability to purpose build commercial jet frames for defense applications both seems to be... a) not performing well (see KC-46), and also b) not a future growth industry with the focus shifting to the Indo-Pacific and peer conflict (given the vulnerability of these types of platforms).

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

They are a big one but not the only one. We still have Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, and maybe others.

Letting them merge with McDonnel-Douglas was a mistake.

buildsjets2• 2 years ago

Letting them merge? Boeing and McD were essentially forced to merge by the Department of Defense post cold-war. So were Lockheed and Martin-Marietta, and Northrop with Grumman, etc. It was in the national strategic interest, apparently. Recommended reading: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...

stackskipton• 2 years ago

Only Lockheed and Northrop are only ones making military aircraft. Raytheon and GD have long stopped.

nsxwolf• 2 years ago

We need keep Boeing around so that SpaceX doesn’t turn into Boeing.

tim3332• 2 years ago

There's other competition out there.

acomjean• 2 years ago

I dont blame NASA, who knows what else is wrong with that capsule.

I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..

Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..

diggan7• 2 years ago

I feel bad for Boeing.

I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?

mym1990• 2 years ago

There are still some, even many, people there that are doing their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad executive decisions. I’m sure morale there is not great. I don’t feel bad for the executives at all, or the company really, but there are likely some great people that are just getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

“between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models,”

haliskerbas• 2 years ago

Completely agree with you, not only are they for profit but they’ve gotten a lot of help from Uncle Sam along the way too!

vardump• 2 years ago

I don't think anyone is feeling bad for Boeing's executives.

But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.

upon_drumhead3• 2 years ago

Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.

spacemadness• 2 years ago

I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do it again someplace else. At least I really hope that’s what they meant. You never know on HN.

mlhpdx• 2 years ago

Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people there have done great work and their collective contributions to the people of the US and world at large is very much appreciated by many (including myself).

It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.

db48x• 2 years ago

They didn’t really try to optimize for maximum profits.

That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.

bottlepalm3• 2 years ago

NASA failed to communicate the seriousness of the issue from the beginning. Their press conference mentioned all the work they've been doing for MONTHS. Who knew? Everyone thought things were 'fine'. Huge huge huge failure by NASA here. They can't be trusted.

TMWNN5• 2 years ago

Example; As late as July 28, NASA flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.

malfist2• 2 years ago

They did communicate. Feel free to peruse the articles from Eric Berger on Ars. Lots of good info there

torginus• 2 years ago

the non competitive defense space

I'm still processing that sentence

johnbellone• 2 years ago

The Boeing of today is merely a husk of its former glory. If the U.S. had another viable domestic airplane manufacturer I bet we’d see a lot more pressure on them. That can still happen. I hope it does.

dingaling• 2 years ago

When Lockheed left the civil aircraft market after the TriStar it was largely because the three-way competition with Boeing and McD was unviable.

Given that, the subsequent merger of McD with Boeing should not have been approved.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

It’s over, you can’t just rebuild the old Boeing. It’s gone.

Good job bean counters.

projectileboy• 2 years ago

Breaking up businesses that are “too big to fail” is good for the economy in the long run, and for defense firms is arguably an issue of national security. It seems to me an incredibly bad idea for a nation to have all of its defense eggs in a single, increasingly fragile basket.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

    > we didn’t really care for [Boeing]

Hi, thank you to share your first hand experience. This is one of best features of HN. Can you provide some specifics (if allowed)?

rx_tx2• 2 years ago

A few tidbits/notes I took:

- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.

- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September

- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats

- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

Why have Crew 9 up there until February?

dotnet007• 2 years ago

That's the standard crew rotation cycle, and their capsules stay as emergency escape vehicles during their stay.

rx_tx2• 2 years ago

Maybe NASA still wants to get something for the money spent launching Crew 9 and get some science done, not just be a rescue mission. They don't want to cut that mission short.

dev_tty013• 2 years ago

- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats

Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.

daveevad• 2 years ago

- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September

What shall we make of all of this should it succeed?

tlb• 2 years ago

Suppose they’ve estimated the risk of failure (and killing the astronauts) as 10%. Then

- returning Starliner empty is the correct decision

- a successful return doesn’t indicate they were wrong about the risk

- the experts will learn a lot more from poring over mission data

sebazzz• 2 years ago

Crew-8 has only 4 seats right? Does reconfiguring mean “configure life support for 6 crew members”?

rst• 2 years ago

NASA press conference ongoing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOswKRSsHc

(Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters, and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)

meroes• 2 years ago

Didn’t they say Teflon was coming off/bubbling and disrupting the flow of the thrusters?

diggan7• 2 years ago

I understood what they were saying about the simulations as that the teflon seemed to have expanded slightly and disrupting the oxidizers input, meaning the thrusters wouldn't work as they should.

dotnet007• 2 years ago

Yes, permanent teflon deformation. Problem is, if the deformation observed in ground tests was permanent, why did the ones in space eventually seem to recover?

That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.

kotaKat• 2 years ago

At least this saves Dave Calhoun becoming a vital participant in the 2024 Senate hearings on missing astronauts.

sidcool• 2 years ago

February 2025!! Whoa.

umeshunni2• 2 years ago

That's for Crew 9, not the Starliner crew

Uvix• 2 years ago

The Starliner crew are staying on the station until then - they'll be leaving on Crew 9.

AnonMO2• 2 years ago

Boeing will probably sue the manufacturer of the failed RCS thrusters in the next year.

extropy• 2 years ago

Possible. Depends how the contract is structured, they may be able to claw back some money from Aerojet.

Boeing still takes all the blame.

bottlepalm3• 2 years ago

Embarrassing, NASA has been downplaying the seriousness of this for months.

Boeing is cooked. SLS should be scrapped. There has got to be consequences for over spending, under delivering, and outright failing.

null0ranje• 2 years ago

It's a fixed-price contract, so Boeing is out $1.5 billion on this.

somenameforme4• 2 years ago

Starliner is the capsule, SLS is the rocket. SLS [1] is not a fixed price contract. The government's dumped tens of billions on it already, and continues to throw good money after bad. And the "fixed" price contract for Starliner keeps getting adjusted with NASA giving them hundreds of millions more dollars, allowing them to skip certain qualifying tests, and so on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

TMWNN5• 2 years ago

Embarrassing, NASA has been downplaying the seriousness of this for months.

As late as July 28, flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.

malfist2• 2 years ago

You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true. They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8, they will have the plan of coming down on crew 9. The starliner is still functional as well, just the risk is unquantified. Remember NASA requires a risk assessment of 1:270 odds to proceed. Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do

Georgelemental• 2 years ago

AIUI SLS is a creation of the US Congress, only they can end it

xyst• 2 years ago

What a massive embarrassment for NASA and Boeing. Boeing name used to mean something, now it’s joined the rest of the junk in this modern world.

soupfordummies• 2 years ago

It’s hard not to be cynical these days when almost everything seems to be “maximize every possible drop of profit at the expense of almost anything else.” It seems so short-sighted and instant-gratification-y.

dylan60410• 2 years ago

I'm waiting for Boeing to change its name to get away from all of the negativity associated with Boeing. It's the classic move for a company that doesn't really want to change business practices, but need to "start over"

bloopernova• 2 years ago

  Blackwater
   |
  Xe Services
   |
  Academi
   |
  Constellis Holdings

I wonder if Boeing will try that? They still seem to be in the "deny deny deny, hope people forget" method of operation.

ivan_gammel• 2 years ago

No, it is not an embarrassment. Space is hard, failures do happen often there. There is and will always be a human factor, politics and cost optimizations. Despite that they delivered people to ISS and have a plan B. It is partial success. The problems will eventually be fixed and USA will solidify its leadership in space race by having different launch systems and never again being dependent on rival powers.

Gareth321• 2 years ago

I think this is much less embarrassing for NASA than Boeing. NASA outsources their engineering now, and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company. It's going to be very difficult for the world to adjust to the new reality that Boeing is no more. It's an even stranger reality that the company which routinely blows up rockets in pursuit of what everyone believed was impossible just a few years ago is now the clear and obvious choice. I think that's the even bigger story here for me: what Musk has done with SpaceX is nothing short of revolutionary. In hundreds of years people are going to be watching this as a pivotal moment in human development: https://youtu.be/sf4qRY3h_eo?si=fAhcunCLHY803wn7&t=454

Look at this shit. Just look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXnMlxK22A

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

NASA has always outsourced their engineering to aerospace companies.

marssaxman5• 2 years ago

Look at this shit. Just look at it:

Thanks for the link. That is truly amazing to watch!

misiti37805• 2 years ago

imagine if you could go back in the past 20 years and show someone that video. it's science fiction level crazy. im happy and proud that happened in the US and not china or russia, everyone else should be too

ren_engineer• 2 years ago

and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company

what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime

404mm• 2 years ago

Why for NASA?

Boeing is the one who (yet again) let everyone down. First by making another unreliable vehicle, then by downplaying the seriousness.

stan_kirdey• 2 years ago

does the crew get paid overtime if they were to stay until Feb?

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

According to a report I read, their extra time is being compensated by Boeing with $50 gift cards for Red Lobster.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

This is evidence of the utter failure of constantly pumping money into a dated cartel of prime contractors that have no incentive to do better. I am very thankful we have Elon Musk to be bold enough to enter this impossibly capital heavy market and show a better way. I hope this is the start of a reset on how taxes are funneled to government contractors.

paxys• 2 years ago

It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.

trothamel2• 2 years ago

Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.

armada6512• 2 years ago

it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.

As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the government's involvement.

baseballdork• 2 years ago

The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.

ceejayoz13• 2 years ago

SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.

delichon• 2 years ago

It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily commute, but faster.

96593• 2 years ago

SpaceX will lose a vehicle. Not a question of if, rather one of when.

relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.

space flight is a dangerous business.

lolinder2• 2 years ago

OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of the ocean and the sub imploded.

Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.

zpeti3• 2 years ago

Does spacex not exist in your world or what?

option2• 2 years ago

we need more than one spacex.

mattmaroon3• 2 years ago

We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.

thegrim33• 2 years ago

And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.

diggan7• 2 years ago

It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.

I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).

maxerickson• 2 years ago

Why are we gonna sustain a presence on the moon?

caconym_5• 2 years ago

Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.

DarmokJalad17012• 2 years ago

Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_F...

detritus• 2 years ago

I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.

Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?

I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.

The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.

zo1• 2 years ago

We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's.

The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).

rockemsockem9• 2 years ago

We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.

Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far

There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.

Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.

golergka2• 2 years ago

One could argue that shuttle program didn't end up as successful as was originally hoped, but it is certainly “serious space development”.

avmich12• 2 years ago

Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.

I wouldn't say they do too much though.

In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.

So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.

Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?

kelnos7• 2 years ago

We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.

Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.

(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)

Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.

And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.

electriclove• 2 years ago

SpaceX is solving this and many similar issues.

Archelaos2• 2 years ago

I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.

krapp• 2 years ago

we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.

We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.

hereme8883• 2 years ago

we haven't? isn't this exclusively a Boeing issue? SpaceX should just get the whole contract.

ceejayoz13• 2 years ago

SpaceX effectively does already. NASA has already bought extra flights from them. It seems likely they'll buy more now.

philwelch3• 2 years ago

This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.

dev_tty013• 2 years ago

You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.

sneak4• 2 years ago

Also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_(spacecraft)

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)

Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.

Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.

treflop• 2 years ago

This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.

Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.

ijidak• 2 years ago

And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!

It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.

Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)

But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.

mbStavola• 2 years ago

We need to nationalize Boeing and get rid of the money men who ran this company into the ground.

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

Nationalized industries have no good record of quality or efficiency.

See Chernobyl.

TMWNN5• 2 years ago

The comment section for the Washington Post article <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/24/starlin...> reporting on today's news is overflowing with anger/despair/grief/denial from anti-Musk, anti-SpaceX people. One example:

For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically, Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers driven" company.
At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270 of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or Engineer, it's up to a politician.
Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run, everybody wins except Musk.

FabHK3• 2 years ago

Private industries have no good record of quality or efficiency.

See Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Fukushima, Enron, Theranos, etc.

With the cheap talking points out of the way, one could examine this question carefully and objectively now.

HL33tibCe7• 2 years ago

So let's get this straight -- the quasi-nationalised Boeing fucks up, a private company steps in to save the day, and your conclusion is that fully nationalising Boeing is the answer?

misiti37805• 2 years ago

lol - i read it the same way

nemo44x• 2 years ago

It’s amazing, isn’t it? These same people complain how everything is broken and that the solution is to double down on it. It’s such a sad state of affairs that the corruption is actively supported by people and they want to feed it more and make it bigger.

Kim_Bruning6• 2 years ago

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "

I think a stronger interpretation would be that Boeing's management/corporate culture needs a dramatic shake-up.

Short of letting the company fail completely if left alone, nationalization might well be the best measure out of a long list of not-great measures to shore things up.

Not saying that it's the measure that should be chosen per-se, but as usual it's often better to be pragmatic than ideological at least.

andromaton• 2 years ago

Nasa website still obfuscating.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...

Practically nobody was asking "how are they bringing back starliner?"

Practically everyone was asking "how are the astronauts returning?"

diggan7• 2 years ago

NASA is focused on the mission, which is the Starliner test flight. Macabre, maybe, but someone has to focus on what they set out to do.

Obviously, they're not gonna just count out the humans involved, but it make sense they want to focus on the core mission.

At least that's how I understood it from listening to the press conference for the last half hour or so.`

wiremine2• 2 years ago

I read "A City on Mars" last year, and it opened my eyes to just hard space travel is. The government constraints on aerospace projects doesn't help. There's a reason SpaceX moves so much faster; they don't have to justify and explain things to taxpayers.

Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).

My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.

I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.

[1] https://www.acityonmars.com/

icegreentea23• 2 years ago

Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.

wiremine2• 2 years ago

Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.

You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.

tim3332• 2 years ago

Well, Boeing seem to have been given about twice the budget, not that it helped much.

NavinF4• 2 years ago

A City on Mars

That book is full of bad science. Some of the silly claims are addressed here: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-ii

sitkack3• 2 years ago

Excellent news! Thank you NASA for making the right human and engineering decision.

This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the vehicle?

Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.

marssaxman5• 2 years ago

Don't spacesuits typically have some umbilical connection to the capsule life support systems? It's easy to imagine that these connectors might not be standardized between different capsules, and that sending up a new space suit might be easier than designing an adapter.

sitkack3• 2 years ago

927!

We are literally building the future, HTF do we keep getting into these situations?

bewaretheirs2• 2 years ago

Easy to imagine but there are so many details to nail down that it's hard to do in practice.

In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:

"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...

dylan60410• 2 years ago

Some where recently, I read something about this being an accepted thing. If you have 2 separate capsules that both use the same connector where there is a fault found with the connector, then both capsules are grounded because of the one connector.

Animats• 2 years ago

"and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams."

Oh, good. Previous proposals included having them return in a Dragon unsuited.[1]

[1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-space...

bewaretheirs2• 2 years ago

I believe that's still the contingency plan in the unlikely event that they have to evacuate the ISS in the period between Starliner undocking and Crew-9 docking.

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

Justin Bailey mode

dylan60410• 2 years ago

From the press conference today, they stated that there is already an extra SpaceX suit on the ISS. Both astronauts have tried it on, and it fits. They will be bringing an additional empty suit up when Crew launches.

somenameforme4• 2 years ago

I'm unsure of the specifics of the Dragon capsule, but I know that on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded to each astronaut. You've gotta keep in mind that the capsules are designed for failure scenarios. That includes things like extremely high g force ejections (pushing close to 20g) from a failing rocket, depressurization scenarios, and so on.

It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

That is quite the analogy. Not sure if it says more about the insane dangers of space or the insane reliability of airplanes.

avmich12• 2 years ago

on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded to each astronaut

The seats are standard, but each astronaut has their own mold, taken on Earth, which is put into the seat.

philwelch3• 2 years ago

When aircraft had that sort of failure rate, everyone involved learned from their mistakes and improved things until they became safer.

tmalsburg2• 2 years ago

How do you know it’s the right decision?

baggy_trough• 2 years ago

Because every Starliner flight has had serious problems but the same cannot be said of the SpaceX vehicle, which is in addition more proven.

alangibson3• 2 years ago

Acceptable loss of crew event is like 1 in 250 (can't remember the exact number). They can't quantify the probability of failure, so not putting them in Starliner is the right call.

james_pm• 2 years ago

The suit is part of the spacecraft. In the case of Dragon, it pressurizes, inflates and deflates at times depending on the phase of the mission.

schiffern4• 2 years ago

Exactly this. You can hear it directly from the SpaceX employees who developed the suits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMwKwcMdIg

ozim2• 2 years ago

I think you underestimate space travel to space station.

Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.

But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.

I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.

lostlogin2• 2 years ago

Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.

If there was a fair chance I’d die on the trip, damn straight if be in my super hero undies too.

sitkack3• 2 years ago

For years I would fly with Sponge Bob Squarepants themed underwear so in the infinitesimal chance of a catastrophe someone cleaning up the wreck might get a chuckle.

Natsu• 2 years ago

I'm just glad they're prioritizing crew safety here. I don't have a lot of trust in Boeing right now.

lokar• 2 years ago

You have to assume Boeings reputation is an issue here. It changes the expected value for the decision maker(s) since the cost of going with Boeing (allowing a crewed return) is so much higher for them personally in the failure case.

mattmaroon3• 2 years ago

This was the only way this could ever play out. After all of Boeing’s last five years, even if 100% unrelated, no bureaucrat anywhere would take that risk. If something goes wrong, you’re the idiot who put the astronauts on a vehicle from a company who has had a long string of recent failures.

Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?

mjamesaustin• 2 years ago

Not only would you be the bureaucrat who put astronauts on a vehicle with documented problems, you would have done so when a perfectly capable alternative was sitting there able to help.

mattmaroon3• 2 years ago

Good point, even worse.

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

Elon Musk is a lot like Kelly Johnson (Lockheed Skunkworks). No company was ever able to replicate the Skunkworks, though many have tried.

I've read biographies of both - well worth reading for anyone who wants to read about great Americans.

vessenes4• 2 years ago

I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the many billions wasted by companies trying to get close tells you -- not so fast.

I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.

I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

Of the ones I learned about, it was because they were going to replicate Skunkworks "only better". The latter broke it every time.

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling

I recently did a presentation on how genius code is code so simple that people dismiss it with "anyone could have done that!"

misiti37805• 2 years ago

Which Kelly Biography - I read "Skunkworks". Is there something else worth reading?

WalterBright15• 2 years ago

"Kelly"

https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/08747449...

theginger• 2 years ago

What happens if you need to file a tax return but you can't because your flight back from space got cancelled and you were delayed for 6 months?

shrubble• 2 years ago

You do get some kind of automatic extension for being out of the country...

mglz• 2 years ago

Does overflying the US in low Earth orbit count as reentry? Or do you need to re-enter the atmosphere im order to re-enter?

refulgentis• 2 years ago

The government forces HN to turn into Reddit: everyone has to post vacuous banter comments until you file. (edit: the post I am replying to was the top comment at the time, for about an hour)

freehorse• 2 years ago

Can't one just file that through internet in the US? They do have internet access as far as I understand.

jraph• 2 years ago

I hope no SMS 2FA is needed for this :-)

ginko• 2 years ago

Don’t tax accountants exist in the US?

edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone else to file your taxes for you, right?

chuckadams• 2 years ago

Yes of course those exist, and the other thing is that the US doesn’t jail people for failing to file a tax return. If you owe, you get a fine, and if you don’t pay the fine they seize assets or garnish wages or whatnot. Usually takes years for this to happen. If you don’t owe, they’re happy to keep your refund til you get around to claiming it later.

LegitShady2• 2 years ago

they force you to file through turbotax on space station internet. Using turbotax is the penalty.

kens• 2 years ago

This actually happened on Apollo 13. Backup pilot Jack Swigert was assigned to Apollo 13 two days before launch because the expected pilot, Mattingly, had been potentially exposed to rubella. The flight launched on April 11, just a few days before the April 15 tax deadline and Swigert realized in flight that he had forgotten to file his taxes. Flight controllers thought it was a joke but Swigert was serious: "It ain't too funny. Things kind of happened real fast down there and I do need an extension. I may be spending time in another quarantine besides the one that they're planning for me." (I.e. besides the 21-day astronaut quarantine, he might end up in prison.)

The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")

Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.

NY Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/13/archives/apollo-13-coasts...

Mission transcript: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

(Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")

At least the customs requirement has been resolved: https://www.flexport.com/blog/apollo-11-astronauts-cleared-m...

cdchn5• 2 years ago

"legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States."

That gave me a good laugh. Shouldn't it definitely count? You're zipping over every country on earth while you're in orbit so you definitely left!

But if you take off and land in the US, did you _really_ leave? You don't go through customs and immigration for every country you fly over when you're in an airplane, and generally aren't legally considered to have "visited" them. So, wow, good question.

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

With that much overtime money surely they can get an excellent accountant!

credit_guy• 2 years ago

I wonder if the astronauts get some type of extra-pay for the time when they are in space. It feels they they should. If that's the case, these 2 astronauts got quite lucky. They were supposed to stay only a few days in orbit, and they end up staying a few months.

starik36• 2 years ago

They should at least cancel their Netflix subscription.

flag32• 2 years ago

Good call.

LegitShady2• 2 years ago

“Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and, ultimately, this comes down to needing a higher level of certainty to perform a crewed return,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “The NASA and Boeing teams have completed a tremendous amount of testing and analysis, and this flight test is providing critical information on Starliner’s performance in space. Our efforts will help prepare for the uncrewed return and will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the spacecraft.”

"we think its gonna blow up"

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

So when is the uncrewed flight back? I wanna watch.

BHSPitMonkey• 2 years ago

"Early September". I'm not sure if any of the live streams of entry/recovery will be cancelled now that Butch and Suni won't be on board.

genter• 2 years ago

"NASA Decides", not "Shitty Boeing Engineering Results In".

Come on NASA, place the blame where it's due.

nomel• 2 years ago

The government war machine doesn't hurt itself, even when its tentacles are spread a bit apart.

bigyikes• 2 years ago

Since there are no people on board…… I hope it blows up

_zoltan_• 2 years ago

One more nail in Boeing's coffin.

shagie2• 2 years ago

While Boeing - the union of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas - needs some fundamental changes, Boeing the company represents a significant trained workforce for aerospace construction.

Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."

Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.

sneak4• 2 years ago

Boeing and the US military are effectively congruent and coterminous.

That said, I too wish for this outcome (the final destruction of the US military and all of their too-big-to-fail supply chain).

practicemaths• 2 years ago

I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit or more risk to the station and crew.

Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)

CrazyStat• 2 years ago

If it were to blow up it would almost certainly be in the atmosphere due to entering at a bad angle or something. This would leave no debris in orbit and would not endanger the station or crew.

jakeinspace• 2 years ago

It would only "blow up" on reentry, don’t think there’s much risk of an actual pressure vessel rupture or hypergolic explosion. So no space debris at least, just littering the ocean.

Shekelphile• 2 years ago

I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit or more risk to the station and crew.

Even if such an explosion happened the debris wouldn't be around for long, stuff in LEO will fall back to earth quite quickly without stationkeeping.

mhandley• 2 years ago

The problematic thrusters are in the service module, which separates and burns up on reentry. So even if it lands OK, they won't learn anything new about the thruster problem by recovering the capsule.

cft2• 2 years ago

I wonder when they plan the return. You should enter a short position if you are sure it'll blow up

Tuna-Fish2• 2 years ago

It's very likely to not blow up. The engineers who studied the issue all think it's much more likely to work just fine with lower thrust levels.

Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog houses when they overheated and some material in them melted, and they cannot be inspected.

What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on it, even though the damage is probably not very large and they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive flight plan.

ozim2• 2 years ago

I think anyone following these news was shorting Boeing for quite some time already.

fnord772• 2 years ago

If the RCS is wonky, wouldn't it be more likely to burn up on reentry not being able to keep its heat shield pointed the right way?

hintymad3• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly. Boeing used to be able to build 747 under budget and ahead of schedule, just like Lockheed could dazzle the world by creating U2 ahead of schedule and under budget with fewer than 200 people (or < 100?) in 15 months with the cost of a few millions. It can't be just the change of geopolitics post Cold War, right? It can't be just that the fixed-margin structure imposed by the government, right? It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right? It can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of accelerated decline as any old-enough company, right?

I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.

lysace2• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly.

I'm sure there's a number of books on the topic in the publishing pipeline.

It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right?

It can.

Jtsummers3• 2 years ago

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737... - Gift Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737... (good for 14 days from today)

https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... - 2020 article on the topic

I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow their various links and you'll get more information.

The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's management culture and things have only declined since.

hintymad3• 2 years ago

Thanks! A follow-up question would be why MD's management won, even though it wreaked havoc. Or it was really just the hindsight...

adsims2001• 2 years ago

Flying Blind by Peter Robison isn't exactly the book you have in mind, but I did enjoy it and it's the closest I know of

theGnuMe3• 2 years ago

I’ll check it out… my guess is that it is a systems and silos problem.

dylan60410• 2 years ago

Wasn't the U2 a skunkworks project where they just did it vs opening it up for input from committee whether from corporate or bureaucratic? Starliner was far far from that. From day one, everyone's fingers were in the pie.

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

Tangent, but I've seen a U2 at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. It's amazing how small that thing is, given its capabilities.

hedgehog• 2 years ago

U2 was Skunkworks, they started with an existing airframe (F-104?) and worked from there. Significant compromises, for example the wings droop so much they skid on the ground on landing and it's use was limited by the improved anti-aircraft missiles that became available around the same time.

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Aggressively incompetent MBA micromanagement.

cqqxo4zV46cp2• 2 years ago

I think that they’re looking for intelligent, insightful analysis. As opposed to the myriad parroted HN comments on the subject, written by developers that pretend that their expertise is somehow transferable.

cube2222• 2 years ago

There is a very nice episode of Last Week Tonight by John Oliver diving into it, accessible on YouTube[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=q4iv_SlqoHlXuJod

atrettel• 2 years ago

I also recommend Mentour's excellent series of videos [1] on this subject too if you want more detail from an aviation perspective.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCbHpJShoXk

trompetenaccoun• 2 years ago

Last paragraph is a bit melodramatic. Here's what's publicly known:

- 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...

philistine3• 2 years ago

The fact that SpaceX demonstrated, without a doubt, that reuse of a first stage was viable in December 2015, and that we still do not have any clearly reusable first stage from anyone else tells you the whole industry is complacent and juiced up on the fat margins of launching a first stage up, then chucking it in the ocean, and then asking for money for another first stage.

ericfr11• 2 years ago

Lobbying is the biggest problem. So much corruption. Everyone is bought, and 2016 showed that, indeed, the US are declining

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.

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.

datameta2• 2 years ago

Corporate rot of engineering-first culture.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

Your say that believing the downfall of Boeing is reflective of the downfall of all of society is "melodramatic", and then spend the rest of your post explaining how Boeing's failures are exasperated by failures in government and other organizations. You defeat your own argument.

Sysreq2• 2 years ago

There US Army generally has one tourniquet that it’s deemed best. The CAT by North American rescue. Every Soldier is awash in these things. They hand them out like candy on Halloween. And rightly so.

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.

Karellen• 2 years ago

The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.

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.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

    > Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation

My sarcastic reply: "Yeah, so what."

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.

elif2• 2 years ago

In the late 00's there were billions on the table of junk contracts for parts service training with crazy pricing to the USAF.

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.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.

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...

KennyBlanken3• 2 years ago

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.

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...

Sevii• 2 years ago

'Lessons from the Titans' has a great chapter on Boeing.

Arainach• 2 years ago

It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, righ

....no, that does in fact explain everything that led to the decline of American manufacturing and engineering.

ulfw• 2 years ago

Companies serving the military and companies serving the population at large should generally be separated. Boeing's fall (thanks to the reverse McDonell Douglas takeover) was mostly as their defense arm grew. Huge margins, a very different type of working. Boeing stopped giving a damn about it's civil aviation business, as is exemplified by moving their HQ from civil manufacturing hub Seattle first to Chicago and now to Arlington County, Virginia literally to suck up to Washington and lobby 24/7.

That's a very different type of business.

If Boeing was forced to make money with a successful civil aviation business alone it would be run very very differently.

NotSammyHagar• 2 years ago

1. MD merging with Boeing and taking over management, basically. Management gurus hate this being pointed out

2. Moving headquarters to Chicago - part of the MBAs taking over

3. Losing the engineering first mindset - this is really the core of what happened there.

When the company kept focusing on stock returns and "financializing" the company, and did things like spinning off Spirt airplane assembly company, that was the real visible symbol of the problem. In the past few months they gave up and rebought them to join with Boeing.

The solution for being will be a multiple year transition of the company into being much more technology and engineering focused. They will have to eject the MBA type "reducing cost is the goal" type leaders. The problem is those are completely the leaders of the company today.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

Absolutely MBAification. But also complexity crisis.

My two most major issues with the world today.

Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.

It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.

Compound that with MBAs that insist things “run lean” and “the core competency group you aren’t in found X, so meet your target of Y or find somewhere else to work” to “We need that BlackRock money, so do whatever the govs of NY, IL, and CA say to do because their trillion dollars speaks”.

No one is ready to address either issue.

weswilson• 2 years ago

There was an internal whitepaper written by a Boeing engineer back in 2001 that warns against the dangers of excessive outsourcing.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...

It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:

"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."

nickff• 2 years ago

The trouble is that government contracts always strongly incentivize ‘excessive outsourcing’, and Boeing’s absorption of MD increased the dependence on government contracts, though Boeing was already on that road (especially after taking on Rockwell). Government oversight (almost) always discourages large profit margins, which makes increasing low-risk costs very appealing. In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely, with the Space Shuttle being a famous example of this, having parts made or assembled in 48 different states.

justinclift• 2 years ago

This book probably has some interesting insights:

"You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing" - December 26, 2008

https://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Order-Change-Turnaround/dp/1...

Probably mostly of the "do the opposite of whatever this guy says" variety. ;)

The top review on this book says:

    The author credits James McNerney for turning around Boeing. He
    neglected to say which way they were turning. For example, he
    credits JN for outsourcing so much of the 787 -- which included
    the wings, perhaps the thing Boeing did best. The 787 ended up
    way over budget and three years late. That's good management?

This seems like a good follow up book too:

https://www.amazon.ca/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/d...

randmeerkat2• 2 years ago

I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.

I’m tired of this hyperbolic, melodramatic angst about the general decline of the U.S. Did you not read the part about the crew being returned by SpaceX? A company that just made landing rockets a reality only 9 years ago, not even 10 years has passed and reusable rockets are as boring as smartphones. NASA identified an issue on the Boeing Starliner, and a cutting edge company (SpaceX) stepped up for a non-emergency rescue mission. There was no loss of life, or equipment, there’s been no injuries, just mild inconveniences. This isn’t a nation in decline, this is a nation that has even begun to peak yet.

hintymad3• 2 years ago

I'd be extremely happy to be wrong, as I invest my life and my family's in the US. As for the concern, it's not about this one particular incident, but about the pattern that other countries have experienced: the government and the society has so many entangled interest that no one knows how to move things forward. As a result, the country perishes. I'm not saying that the US is in that trajectory, but I did see some aspects of institutional decay, like the cost of canon shells is 6X of Russian's, despite that Russia is a much more corrupt country, or like the country is so divided and many people simply accept that election is about telling stories and personal attacks instead of logical discussion of policies. Like it would take billions to build the next-gen battleships or planes, and we couldn't have good enough supply chain in the US. Like our medical system is so much more expensive than other developed countries, and the list can go on.

Scarblac• 2 years ago

How many of the US brightest go work in aerospace engineering these days?

Edit: and to those that do, SpaceX probably looks a lot more attractive.

Glawen2• 2 years ago

Probably not a lot when in the same city you have two huge tech companies. You would be crazy to go to Boeing

gmerc• 2 years ago

Stock buyback for investor gratification enabled the most optimal way for executives to keep meeting kpis in the short term rather than long term investments

cjblomqvist• 2 years ago

There's a lot of theory about this. Look into strategy theory. A few well know concepts as entry points; Feedback loops, path dependency, disruptive innovation, group thinking. Other related concepts needed to analyze the Boeing story completely to understand their strategic position and defensibility could be; Core competence, Blue Ocean, Porter's Five Forces. More macro and fundamentally I'd look into Austrian school if thought and "destructive innovation", and core concepts such as division of labor.

Without knowing the details it makes a lot of sense that Boeing ended where they did (Boeing/SpaceX fits a lot of theories above). What may save the US is not the ability to save companies like Boeing - that would more likely hinder progress on a mid to long term scale - it's the ability to come up with new companies/innovators to overtake the incumbents.

In my interpretation. Fundamentally it goes all the way to the quality of institutions and culture. Time will tell, but I'm feeling more worried about those than the current ability to innovate.

csomar• 2 years ago

I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.

Markets cycle. Companies cycle. People cycle (actually just die unless you consider their offspring their continuation).

All systems do cycle; including the USA. It doesn't mean it's the end. If China doesn't rise and crashes it, there isn't really any other serious challenger and it will likely be the "rising" empire again.

christophilus• 2 years ago

Eh. Maybe. My money’s somewhere in between. The US is an empire in decline, but it isn’t clear that China is the replacement. If China can somehow survive demographic collapse, then I’d put my money on them, but that’s a big if.

kabdib• 2 years ago

"McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money" is how it was explained to me

Leftium• 2 years ago

How Boeing Lost Its Way: https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU

simonh• 2 years ago

SpaceX is a US company too. The government has to be comfortable letting the incumbents fail, so that companies like SpaceX and Anduril can take their place.

Glawen2• 2 years ago

I read the book on GE, Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric. I guess many things apply to Boeing too.

merman• 2 years ago

Any organization that seemingly operates poorly typically just has bad incentives. Congressional funding for space became a feedback loop of pork for states (jobs program) from Apollo, continuing to today with SLS. Commercial crew demonstrates how stunningly dystopian over-specific congressional funding is. The solution is simple: Congress should take a giant step back from NASA involvement so NASA can have more commercial programs like commercial crew.

dwallin• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the way we structure, fund, and manage modern corporations creates tons of poor incentives all on its own, no legislative influence needed. (unless your goal is to maximize short term profit signals at all costs)

Bluestein• 2 years ago

can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of accelerated decline

Peak air-travel.-

talldatethrow• 2 years ago

I know two MIT grads that then went on to work at Boeing as mechanical engineers.

They are not impressive at all on almost any subject you talk to them about. Not for Boeing engineers and definitely not as MIT grads.

I don't think they could handle the coursework at Cal IMO, and I thought MIT was even more difficult.

They do seem like a very good example of diversity DEI type admission and hiring. And these kinds of Boeing problems might be the result.

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Wendover made a pretty good video on the topic.

https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU?si=XAJggvhaCwbyPcZF

fredgrott• 2 years ago

key point:

NASA and BOEING disagreed on whether it was safe for Starliner to depart to Earth with astronauts.....

I think it might be time to short Boeing stock....

fullshark• 2 years ago

I think it might be time for the gov't to nationalize the company

gduplessy• 2 years ago

Yes, let's make them even less efficient.

mkoubaa2• 2 years ago

That's a 20th century solution.

The right thing to do now is to shutter the company and make all it's patents and designs public domain

cft2• 2 years ago

Same as shorting the dollar: it will fall, but you don't know when

FeepingCreature2• 2 years ago

I want to call my bank and take Boeing out of the composition of my personalized synthetic index fond. Sadly, nobody offers that.

cdfuller• 2 years ago

Where was that stated? In the press conference they said Boeing deferred to NASA to make the decision because they had a better perspective on the entire landscape of the problem.

fnord772• 2 years ago

Did anyone explain to Boeing management that two astronauts dying a fiery death would be a far bigger hit to the company's stock and reputation than just writing this capsule off?

spoonfeeder006• 2 years ago

At first I misread that as the astronauts would come back aboard the starliner

And I was like...now I'm scared for them

Arn_Thor• 2 years ago

The only sensible choice. Glad to see NASA make the right call. Putting the lives of the crew over expedience is the correct priority.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

Many of you might assume that Starliner is a cost-plus contract. Cost-plus contracts are common for large capital projects but they often end up running way over budget because the provider is essentially incentivized for budget overruns because they get paid more.

It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2 billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We ened more of this.

SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus contracts.

It's common for companies and governments to want to have more than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to be substantially lower than Starliner's.

So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for its failures.

Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted to SVP.

Laremere• 2 years ago

I doubt NASA wants to put 4 astronauts on the next Starliner flight. So if NASA declares this crewed flight test a failure and requires a redo (and possibly even reverting back to a third out of one planned uncrewed flight test), Boeing is still on the hook for their operational 6 crewed flights.

Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.

tzfld• 2 years ago

If they manage to human rate Vulcan, I don't think it would be technically hard to launch Starliner on it. Just looking at Cygnus which used three different rockets from three different companies.

IAmNotACellist• 2 years ago

"They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let them crash."

laweijfmvo• 2 years ago

So, what happens if it does blow up, or otherwise has a catastrophic failure on re-entry? Will we be able to say for certain if it was due to Starliner’s faults, or just the fact that there wasn’t a human pilot?

All Boeing hate aside this is a learning experience for everyone involved.

caconym_5• 2 years ago

It will certainly be (rightly) blamed on the vehicle. It's designed to operate completely autonomously---they flew two full test flights that way before ever putting crew on it.

sneak4• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure it will be blamed not on the vehicle, but on the company that manufactured it.

flohofwoe• 2 years ago

I would be very surprised if any human actions are required for delivering people into and returning them from space, or even any controls being present in the capsule to allow the human payload making any changes to flight parameters ;)

teractiveodular• 2 years ago

Yes? There's ridiculous amounts of telemetry in these things.

sneak4• 2 years ago

For how long have they been claiming that these crew members aren’t stranded up there?

shirro2• 2 years ago

Boeing was awarded more money for their vehicle, had years of extra time and two previous demonstration flights. This flight should have been close to flawless given the additional time Boeing had for remediation and testing. Boeing engineers should have understood their systems well enough to convincingly demonstrate the vehicle met NASA's safety requirements. Even after much additional testing during the flight they couldn't make their case. Starliner will probably complete its third uncrewed return intact and people might question if NASA was being overly cautious but perhaps Boeing should have supplied a crewed vehicle with reliable thrusters and avoided this embarrassment.

black_13• 2 years ago

Boeing problems are because everyone wants their 401k to return as much as possible Boeing got to where it is because of Wall Street

adwf• 2 years ago

And don't forget that SpaceX had to sue the government/Boeing/Lockheed/ULA, multiple times, just in order to be allowed to compete for these contracts rather than having it locked down to the usual suspects.

suggestion• 2 years ago

This is what happens when MBAs are made technical leads in charge of engineers. All the big 5 Federal Contractors are plagued like this.

davidparks21• 2 years ago

Near flawless is an unreasonable expectation. SpaceX had the advantage of running years of cargo missions. The error was simply not using the same successful model with any new vehicle.

averageRoyalty• 2 years ago

What a weird argument. Boeing has the advantage of building things for space and NASA since the 60s - orbiters, rockets etc. They had a 40 year head start and some of the best engineers in the world. Near flawless compared to a 20 year old company I would say is a very reasonable expectation.

shirro2• 2 years ago

It is subjective language but for me "near flawless" is a reasonable expectation for a qualification flight. Not perfect because that is unreasonable. A leaking toilet would have been fine if Starliner had one. It isn't a critical system. An off-nominal thruster or two would also be acceptable. They have redundancy for a reason.

The helium leaks were not desirable but helium is difficult. Boeing engineers could demonstrate the rate of the leaks did not threaten the mission so it was manageable.

The thruster issues are completely different. Boeing couldn't present NASA with a convincing model of how the thrusters would perform. If they can't characterize such a fundamental part of the vehicle it is impossible to make an informed decisions which is a huge fail.

In hindsight a cargo first experience would have been valuable for commercial crew whether the winner was Sierra, NG or Boeing however that would have disqualified Sierra and Boeing. Boeing's involvement in commercial crew legitimized it politically. Boeing directly, via acquisition and through their suppliers including Aerojet have decades of experience in space flight far beyond SpaceX at the time. Boeing were not the underdogs.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

It actually disgusts me reading the boeing subreddit and how there's comments coming from obvious traders or management being upvoted straight up lying through their teeth about this.

I'll quote one:

"It’s ridiculous. Only a few of the 27 thrusters had issues. The capsule is designed to operate with only half the thrusters."

(4 upvotes)

Obviously the reply to it straight up calls him out and exposes it, but it just shows that people around Boeing have no respect whatsoever for human safety, it's all dollar bills to them...

I do not think I'd trust my life to boeing anytime soon, I do not want to be guessing mid flight if the boeing I'm on was built in the last 20 years or not (newer = less safe)

kiddico• 2 years ago

There was an... interesting reddit thread 3 hours before the announcement leaking the decision. I'll just let you enjoy the thread yourself:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...

someperson• 2 years ago

Space journalist Eric Berger of Ars Technica has been speaking to his contacts and writing articles about the very likely SpaceX Crew 9 plan for the last week.

kelnos7• 2 years ago

A little difficult for Boeing's stock price to tank on a Saturday, though...

But I bet the market will have some things to say on Monday, unless Boeing can do some damage control before then.

whimsicalism• 2 years ago

presumably there are private liquidity pools

theGnuMe3• 2 years ago

This was the only possible outcome politically. It’s also likely the best one safety wise as well.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Boeing’s space program is effectively DOA with this. How do they recover from this? Seems like a huge win for spacex.

worik• 2 years ago

Hitchhikers!

poopsmithe• 2 years ago

The most bonkers thing to me is how Starliner was allowed to fly with crew on board when it was on the pad leaking helium. This leaking was known and ongoing for hours and they let it fly anyway.

ethical2• 2 years ago

The problem? Agile and Software. Too many monkeys trying to write a Shakespeare non masterpiece.

ethical2• 2 years ago

The problem? Agile and software. Too many monkeys trying to write a Shakespeare non masterpiece.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

the cost of abstraction and complexity is shining through. hope the next mission goes as planned.

egorfine• 2 years ago

It seems that for Boeing management, engineering is an annoying nuisance that gets in the way of making money.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Crazy to think they would have had to be saved by Russia were it not for SpaceX.

elif2• 2 years ago

I suspect this is a component of why the presumptive president is pushing the unrealized gains tax. If Elon were forced to produce tens of billions liquid he would have to sell shares of his companies, and perhaps IPO spaceX, allowing the government to more tightly control it.

pharos92• 2 years ago

McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money. Engineering culture died and became bean-counter, lowest common denominator corporate-culture. Lobbying went up, outsourcing to third world went up, quality went down, whistleblowers fired and suppressed.

These organizations no longer exist for the purpose of building great products and pushing the limits of engineering. It's easier to operate on the tit of the state and rake in billions through sleazy backroom deals and lobbying with the state acting as an artificial intermediary between cause and effect.

jcalvinowens• 2 years ago

Are there any more detailed technical reports about the current starliner problems out there yet? All I can find are a few paragraphs in press releases. Maybe we just have to wait.

smsm42• 2 years ago

Can somebody convince Musk to start making planes now? Flying on Boeings is kinda getting scary now, and Airbus standing alone is not healthy.

underseacables• 2 years ago

Common sense has finally prevailed. IMO Boeing fought this tooth and nail because of Musk, risking the lives of the astronauts to save corporate face. Heads should roll but Boeing is too big to fail, to big to jail, and the executives will make out with a golden parachute in the end.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Nasa's full announcement here: <https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...>

(From an alternate submission, I'd recommended that URL be substituted for the Twitter link.)

NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9

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