Why create a round trip space craft, when you can build and discard two one-way craft for twice the price?
(At first I didn't think this could really work, until I realized the second craft could have been towed up by the first.)
Incredible kudos to SpaceX, when you consider its comparable competitors repeatedly fumble (Boeing), move slow (Blue Origin), lost their edge (Russia), fidget spinner themselves out of relevance (ULA, Arianespace, Orbital Sciences), whiffed (Sea Launch), or very "successfully" build, launch and discard fortunes (er, flights) for the purpose of justifying those same flights (er, fortunes) (NASA).
Kudos to China too for some prolonged and relatively rapid progress. It will be interesting to see how that progress continues given the "Coolish War" we are now in.
I don’t understand why those who praise space-x also take the time to bad mouth nasa. They are basically teammates here. Space-x has done some great things (kudos to Shotwell) but they did it on the shoulders of nasa and government funding, and that’s ok too.
They pre-date the literal magazine, but definitely Vanderbilt, John Astor, Jay Gould, Rockefeller if you count that standard oil was broken up into multiple ones, and Moses Taylor if you count that he did not found, but rescued and built up citibank from an early stage, not unlike tesla.
You can search for persecution of Elon wherever you would like but there is none here. It’s my understanding that Shotwell is running the show there and Elon is mainly hands off. There are many achievements I believe should bear Elons name like the back-to-back live stream debacles over at xitter or the cybertruck… but he is not as involved in the engineering decisions with space-x and it shows.
while it’s true that spacex is a private company, it’s widely known that they are highly profitable. they have many institutional investors, and a long line of people that would love to be on their cap table.
the article you linked to is more than a year old, and does acknowledge that at the time spacex was flirting with profitability. do you contend that they are not currently “profitable”?
also, many (maybe most?) privste companies deny employees who have options access to complete company financial statements.
This. Elon’s entire MO is to lose more money than competitors, then raise more in the markets. Rise, repeat, claim successes, when in reality competitors just aren’t willing to lose that much money bootstrapping. SpaceX is no different.
The SLS just isn't one of them. It is a temporary Frankenstein resulting from the complications of adapting to a sudden uptick in private space transit, while necessarily maintaining congressional demand/funding continuity. A special dance well known for not being strictly reality based.
So my criticism of SLS isn't criticism of NASA leadership. I cannot imagine how difficult their job is. The nature of the beast is some waste is unavoidable.
In the meantime, lots of NASA projects are stellar.
Not only funding, but lots of technology, like original research into heat shield. And that's part of the intent of the NASA - it's as designed. Yet NASA is criticized because it doesn't do much useful lately - yes, it pays to SpaceX and yes, it runs ISS, slowly designs Moon program etc., but could do oh so much more judging by the past successes.
Kinda like current Arianespace current development though. Definitely would have put them in the 'move slow' category with Blue Origin. I think I like BO current tech better but Arianespace produce public, peer-reviewed research that other will be able to build on (right now it seems they're closing on non-hydrogen fuels)
Sorry for sending a reply to a different message, but I got imgpls Safari extension to work on Iphone.
in settings, you need to go to Safari and there in extensions, in there beyond enabling imgpls there's also a menu at the bottom where it says "websites content and history" and you should find both imgur and reddit. Instead of ask, switch both to "allow". It will work then!
Since SpaceX is a private company, neither of us knows how much SpaceX spent internally on their fixed-price contract.
What we do know is that NASA awarded contracts to both companies in 2010. Crew Dragon worked perfectly on their first crewed flight in 2020, and has taken astronauts to ISS half a dozen times.
NASA paid SpaceX the originally agreed amount of $3.1 billion for six flights, and SpaceX seems happy to continue the arrangement. Boeing has spent $6.7 billion so far.
>What we do know is that NASA awarded contracts to both companies in 2010. Crew Dragon worked perfectly on their first crewed flight in 2020, and has taken astronauts to ISS half a dozen times.
More detail for others: SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more. Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The current Starliner flight in abeyance at ISS is a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
SpaceX received fixed price contracts at lower prices than Boeing's and then delivered on those contracts, ferrying 7 full crews and one test crew to and from ISS with an 8th full crew about to return and a 9th soon launching, all with no additional charges.
Boeing has charged hundreds of millions above and beyond the fixed price contract and has yet to deliver and return astronauts from ISS on a single completed mission.
Except crew dragon is half the price and has flown repeatedly.
SpaceX absolutely has had lots of test failures - they've probably blown up more rockets then many recent players - but their cadence is super quick, and their cost per item far far lower and they seem to be able to fix stuff.
Somebody does, but it's a private company, so, private books, so the general public doesn't know.
You can do some napkin math and guess that their flights for NASA are profitable, along with all the other commercial work they do. We don't know if SpaceX as a whole is profitable, but, I'd assume it's not given how heavily they're into R&D at this point.
What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development if their cost per kg is actually realized.
Right, so the point was all this handwaviness about how bloated Boeing's costs are in this space are just wild guesses at what SpaceX's might be.
For all anyone actually knows, Elon is willing to lose a ton per launch just to gain mindshare, kill the competition, and become the only game in town. You know, the Amazon playbook.
For all anyone knows, the Boeing quotes are reasonable and SpaceX's are unsustainable. Nobody actually knows... yet so many are willing to confidently assert SpaceX is obviously cheaper.
> What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development
This is a space race. The day when SpaceX no longer needs to spend "crazy amounts of money on development" may never actually come.
1. Being a viable sustainable business is a requirement for some of SpaceX's NASA and the Space Force's contracts. NASA & the Space Force have access to SpaceX's books and SpaceX has passed these audits.
2. SpaceX has very obviously been spending many billions to build Starlink and Starship and to pay >14,000 employess. SpaceX has not raised significant money for over 18 months, nor have previous raises been enough to cover their fairly obvious expenditures. That money is coming from somewhere, and process of elimination says "profits".
I only know second hand what's happening at boeing, specifically, I know someone who was in charge of their IT infra there, at one of the parts manufacturing facilities. They frequently were given a project to spec out and then implement, and the management never asked how much anything would cost and early in their time there, when it was brought up, it was handwaved off as not important. Their direct management later told them that they don't have a budget for -anything- and to not worry about it.
Now, that may just have been the case for IT infra, but, their impression was that at very least their facility had a blank check and costs didn't really matter.
Ironically, they left after getting a promotion while stiffing them on a raise. That, understandably, didn't sit well with them in the light of the rest of the situation.
What we do know is that SpaceX was able to deliver the requirements 4 years (and counting) earlier than Boeing. And they continue to deliver. Yeah, they could be losing money hand over fist, but at the very least they delivered.
The current contract charges NASA about $280 million per Crew Dragon mission. The F9 costs SpaceX about $20 million to launch, so as long as refurbishing a Dragon costs less than $260 million dollars, yes, SpaceX is making a profit on these flights.
Also, some of this is accounted for by a difference in development philosophy. The typical NASA project tests finished designs to make sure that they'll work. SpaceX frequently (currently for Starship) tests half-finished designs because they want to know how they will fail, for future revision. (Example: between starship flight tests 1 and 2, the whole staging method changed; forward fins are being relocate on Starship starting, I think launch after next to reduce heating in reentry, etc.)
They do tests on production vehicles too, e.g. the static fires that precede just about every launch, but those aren't directly comparable to the stuff they deliberately blow up to see how that happens.
In an ideal world NASA would also do this (see the Apollo program). The optics of a government program ‘failing’ are so spectacularly bad they simply cannot afford to do this.
Regardless of sourcing, this is the kind of article that gets people talking, and can be self-fulfilling.
I don't see the value to Boeing, or its traumatized shareholders, in continuing the losses.
Starliner isn't fully reusable, so unlikely to ever be really profitable. It is a very poor start to any wider space ambitions.
If I was Boeing's CEO, I would have confidentially got the conversation rolling too. But this is off the record, deep background. No attribution on those statements, please!
Dragon has a more integrated design. It has a "trunk module" which is a kind of service module lite.
So presumably, Dragon is not completely reusable (the trunk is discarded), but more reusable than Starliner in that greater functionality is preserved in the reusable capsule.
Agreed. In that, Dragon is a better design overall. At least they can see what went wrong with the propulsion pods after the craft lands. To do that for Starliner would require an EVA and do things to the craft it was definitely not designed to do.
If a faulty pod could be detached, the sane EVA would be to close the docking hatch, depressurise the capsule, open its side hatch, detach the pod and put it inside the capsule in a way it wouldn't bang on everything (it'd still contaminate everything with its remaining propellants), close the hatch and let it come back to Earth with the remaining functioning propulsion pods.
I watched the NASA press conference, where the decision was announced, and Bill Nelson said that the new Boeing CEO promised him he will work with NASA to keep Starliner flying.
It will require quite a significant investment to fix the project, while Boeing is already loosing money on this fixed price contract.
I really, really hope Boeing doesn't cancel Starliner. Trading a public space monopoly for a private one would be a huge net negative for the country.
The SpaceX leadership has goals that can be opaque and need not align with NASA's. Recently, in the context of X and Tesla, they've bordered on deranged and even anti-American.
If Boeing can get out of the learning phase, even as an imperfect company, it can provide a most valuable service even if its platform is nominally second best.
It is depressing that the only option is to keep throwing money at an sclerotic, extractive, incomponent player. How pro-american has boeing been in the past 20 years really?
Boeing isn't the only possible competitor to Crew Dragon, but even it it were, the ISS is dead in 5 years, so who really cares about a short-term Dragon monopoly. Focus on the future and stop throwing good money after bad with Boeing and over the ancient ISS which is about 85% of the way to incineration.
Well it's the work of the present. Those who survive the present will build the future. Any steady state scenario with one company getting more than 40% of the contracts is fundamentally worse than in-housing at NASA.
I don't think there's a real danger of a true monopoly. There are a number of other options:
1. Orion -- heavier than Dragon so you need a bigger rocket, but it should be able to dock with the space station, and it's already flown uncrewed
2. DreamChaser -- Currently being developed uncrewed, but it was originally supposed to fly with crew, and Sierra says they still want to do a crewed version. It's been moved to Cape Canaveral and is supposed to fly next year.
3. Blue Origin is rumored to be back working on some sort of orbital capsule.
Capitalism doesn't work if you don't let companies that aren't delivering fail. IMO what's probably happened at Boeing's space division is that they're not able to recruit and retain top people anymore given the explosion of new space companies.
Obviously they haven't been moving as fast as SpaceX, but they've delivered New Shepherd and the BE-4 engine, which has flown on the Vulcan and is supposed to fly on New Glenn. The BE-4 is comparable to the Raptor.
> Capitalism doesn't work if you don't let companies that aren't delivering fail.
This argument only works in competitive markets. This market is more or less a natural monopoly due to the massive upfront R&D investment and learning-by-doing requirements. NASA has to constantly wrestle with this 'force' in order to keep it an oligopoly.
If it fails to do so, it should stop the experiment and go back to in-housing everything. Only with an oligopoly (or better) does the American public benefit at all from privatization.
All current problems notwithstanding, SpaceX in 20 years of existence delivered a lot of progress to the aerospace abilities of the whole world. No matter what they'll do next, SpaceX already shown a number of important achievements.
Hope they'll continue.
Also I'm not sure if Boeing's goals are more aligned with NASA's than SpaceX's ones with those of general public - and that public would probably disapprove such things as SLS.
This is the first time ever that we've had competition in the form of multiple companies that can deliver astronauts to orbit.
As for NASA "in-housing" everything, that's always been a continuum. Mercury is probably the last spacecraft that you could really say NASA designed internally that flew. Even operationally, for the last part of the Shuttle program, most all of the operations were done by the United Space Alliance.
That said, I agree that NASA has a role to play to encourage diversity and competition, and IMO they've done that with Orion, Dragon, and DreamChaser. Just because SpaceX could use some competition doesn't mean it has to be Boeing.
Boeing isn't in a learning phase... more of a how much can we underpay our employees and how many cheap subtractors can we get away with phase. Also starliner would not be "nominally" second best, but truly second, or perhaps third best if other options come around(dreamchaser).
Musk may be huffing the right wing nonsense too much, but I don't know if he has actually done anything anti-american(though supporting someone as obviously corrupt as Trump could be considered so I suppose), much of the headlines about him appear to be clickbait nonsense.
SpaceX can't do jack shit without Gov approval, so it wouldn't really matter if they had ulterior motives.
X and Tesla are some of if not the most pro-American values companies in the world. Sorry if freedom of speech offends you but that definitely puts you at odds with the American Founders and myself - an American.
> According to DCMA officials, this is a high number of CARs [Corrective
Action Requests] for a space flight system at this stage in development and reflects a recurring and degraded state of product quality control.
> Quality control issues at Michoud are largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing
If this was to be a "jobs" program more than anything, I guess that makes sense. They just added more "jobs" but never actually bothered to train anyone. Doesn't Boeing worry how this looks on them? I would be terribly embarrassed if I was anywhere adjacent to that team's leadership.
First item "Start with engineering excellence. A strong engineering foundation enables us to build and maintain our products with safety, quality and integrity in the factory and in service. Our customers expect it. That’s why we will always take the time to get the engineering right".
Well, they failed their very first principle, didn't they. At least don't put it right at the top, hide it down at the bottom to at least avoid being accused of hypocrisy.
My understanding was that this was a firm fixed price contract, not a cost contract. Boeing can't just cancel the contract once they are underwater, it would defeat the purpose of FFP which is to shift risk to the contractor. The government can and will demand specific performance. Usually with FFP the contractor will outline ALL assumptions made which the government will clarify and agree to. The contractor will price all of that out, apply a risk multiplier 1.5x - 2.0x and target a 30% margin on all of that. FFP contracts typically have the highest potential for profit vs. 'cost plus' contracts.
Boeing can walk at any time. NASA cannot. Boeing has been paid for what they've delivered (plus some nice bribes to keep trying) and not for what they have not delivered so they an walk today if they want. NASA cannot walk though and would not.
Has anyone done the analysis on looking at the checks NASA is writing compared to the total contract price to know how front-loaded or how much money is still remaining in the contract? That seems like the easiest way to figure out whether its worth it for them to continue or not.
NASA loses money and time waiting and helping Boeing to perform. And then they get minimal performance, given the program and company's now chronic underperformance.
Meanwhile, SpaceX provides a solid tested path forward. Despite the single sourcing.
I see a negotiated retreat, favorable to all parties. Likely in some incremental way to minimize attention and backlash. I.e. delay, study, delay, negotiate, delay, close up shop.
Parterships operating under a legal gun don't really operate. And are not conducive to safety concerns.
> Parterships operating under a legal gun don't really operate.
It's business, nothing personal, right? Boeing can be welcome to bid on the next project - after siphoning and wasting lots of NASA's money on this one, and losing badly a solid chunk of its own because of internal problems. Why can't partnership continue?
Nobody wants Boeing to go out of business, just to pay what they owe to taxpayers.
When a long term business partnership becomes unattractive for one side, the lack of win-win degrades the relationship for both parties.
It causes conflict between mutually valid but now competing priorities (profitability vs. contracted deliverables), demoralization, delays for analysis and consensus building around unpleasant decisions, key people moving on to better contexts, etc.
I am not talking about bad faith.
The primal cause could be failure by one party. But it could also be a market change, critical supplier loss, or other unrecognized reality surfacing.
If Boeing and NASA cut losses on Starliner, they could still work together in the future. Presumably, with both sides doing a better job of understanding their respective and joint risks.
--
Never mistake a good partnership contract, with a good partnership. More than a good contract has to come together for the latter.
And it is wise to have pre-settled terms for unwinding contracts at any time by either parties discretion, to reduce the time to correct a bad situation, and minimize the costs of mishaps and distractions for everyone.
It's possible Boeing may be forced to subcontract part of the work to SpaceX, but looking like they are trying to find a buyer for the JV itself which would relieve Boeing but saddle the buyer with the troubled contract
Boeing is a key part of the military-industrial complex and has very close ties to the US government (the movement of people between the two groups is especially interesting). "Too big to fail" might not accurately describe it. "Too connected to fail", maybe?
They're too big and too important to go through Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but Chapter 11 bankruptcy can and should happen. Wipe out the shareholders and executives but keep the company intact.
Boeing, even without the military connection, is one of the more important companies in the US for exports. They are also too big to fail. It's very much in the national interest for them to right the ship. The same is true of Intel. Their domestic fabs are -very- important to NatSec.
Agreed. Yes, we have national security interests in having the capability to build airplanes, etc., but there must be a way to maintain that capability without permanently giving one company and its executives the right to mismanage unlimited amounts of money. Maybe some more flexible mechanism that can handle networks of smaller companies achieving the same end result.
If you consider it national interest, why as the biggest shareholder and bagholder do you not have board members that veto actions that are profitable but bad for national interest?
No it's the other way around. The Boeing we have today is the result of mergers. For example McDonnell Douglas that built the f-18 amongst other things was acquired in 1996.
They merged the companies, but outsourced component manufacturing to the lowest bidder and didn’t bother to check the lowest bidder was actually delivering what was needed.
The popular story is when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in the late 90's, Boeing's engineering-driven culture was replaced with the more financialization-driven culture from McDonnell execs.
The 737-MAX saga was kinda the culmination of when profit-motivated shortcuts bump up against realities of engineering safety margins. I'm sure everyone has their campfire variation on this, tons has been written about it.
So yeah on the financial shenanery, but more culture/people-in-charge than conglomeration-megacorp per-se.
The unfortunate reality is that those who implement policies that produce short term gain but long term costs that strike after they have moved on look better than those who actually look to the long haul.
If we do, and SpaceX takes its place, it's only a matter of time before SpaceX ends up in with the exact same problems. It's not fair to compare the two companies on an apples to apples basis, as the rules they operate under may as well be from different planets.
Boeing's problems come from the regulatory environment and congressional horse trading that created it. SpaceX doesn't have these constraints for now, but the moment SpaceX replaces Boeing all that scrutiny and backroom dealing that created Boeing will start to carry over.
I'm not sure Boeing's problems are entirely due to the bureaucratic horse trading that infests many government acquisition programs. That issue shouldn't have affected their commercial airplanes, which seems to suffer from similar quality issues.
It actually seems to be a systemic issue that has been affecting many American companies and slowly grown worse over the last 50 years. The management views themselves as increasingly indispensable and the lower ranks of workers as commodities subject to arbitrage, where 10 years experience at this company is somehow just as valuable as 10 years somewhere else - despite not having the same institutional knowledge and connections. We've seen this with traditional "American" companies, such as Ford and GM, and even with the more established companies in the tech sector.
This is fundamentally caused by a shift how management has operated. The emphasis on market performance over dividends and increasingly public role of business leadership. With that, executive compensation becomes another signal of a company's confidence as a tool to drive market price. Businesses compete over lavish executive perks not to find the best talent, but as conspicuous consumption to signal their value to investors.
At the same time, human resources have worked to standardize and measure workers. Trying to turn them into interchangeable cogs, because it seems cheaper to think that way. But people are not cogs and reducing people to keywords on a resume loses valuable data. This is true when apples to oranges comparisons are made between the current employees and prospective employees. The precise nature of experience and how it maps to their company is lost so current employees are undervalued in the comparison. Likewise the value of proximity and relationships between management and workers and even local governments. This has lead to many off-shoring decisions that led to unexpected losses in the medium term, some of which were ultimately rolled back.
Start a new company and hire all the engineers. Not like we need any of the C staff to make it function. There's plenty you can do, the obstacle is regulatory capture rather than lack of options
Why would I want to hire all the engineers? Surely at least some share the blame. I don't really agree with you in general, but if I were starting a new company I'd probably be pretty selective about hiring Boeing engineers if I really thought it were a pervasive company culture problem.
Why is that your point of contention? If the goal is to have Boeing provide engineering capacity without all the cost cutting drama, all I'm suggesting is a change of governance.
Assuming there's a real cultural issue, I doubt that the C-suite is the entire problem. Just bringing in some new senior management is probably not the answer. You probably need to cull down to at least some level of mid-level people. At least that's what I would do.
That was done, by executive order during wartime, to some underperforming manufacturing companies during WWII. Here's that story, by the Navy admiral who personally led the takeover of the plants.[2] The Navy fired the C-suite of the Los Angeles Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, at 10 AM on December 8, 1943, for incompetence.
"Mr. McCoomb was informed that he, Mr. Alfred F. Smith, and the comptroller, Mr. Beeman, were informed that they were no longer on the payroll of the plant". Eventually the Government had to settle up with the stockholders, but the C-suite people were gone.
Are you proposing the federal government invoke The War Powers Act or The Defense Production Act and seize all of Boeing's production assets? During peacetime? Over engineering failures in the civilian sector? Does anybody actually believe that would fly in court?
Well… you can always invade someone and end these inconveniences of peacetime. Venezuela has a lot of oil very close to the US and recently disagreed with the US government about who was elected for their president.
Something like the Defense Production Act alone technically gives the government the authority to control civilian production in virtually any way if it meets a standard based on criticality to national defense (not hard to imagine the argument for boeing).
Using that power requires political support from the legislature and courts, I don't think we're there today, but if for example a critical fighter jet (or some other high visibility project) went south, boeing has been shitting the bed hard enough to support federal intervention.
Classified? We see their products every day... with a few exceptions, darn near every aircraft the US military flies today was designed, maintained, built or led by Boeing and/or it's affiliates. Their coverage spans drones, aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, rockets and more.
The civilian side of Boeing almost doesn't even need to exist.
So we're going to lambast the entire company because one arm has stumbled with two projects recently... ?
Perhaps we should nationalize and shut down Google because Gemini hasn't turned out to be that great.
>Perhaps we should nationalize and shut down Google because Gemini hasn't turned out to be that great.
I think you meant that sarcastically, in which case - Welcome to Hacker News!
And as for the military side of thing, you wouldn't believe the stories I've heard about that. Between the hanger queens they sold and Cold War superiority stuff they're still trying to sell...If they weren't notionally an "American" company then I doubt they'd still be in business.
They can't per say fire them. But they could start cancelling contracts if they think Boeing isn't going to deliver. And they can break up the company into smaller ones to foster competition this has happened in the past in other industries.
In the name of national security they could nationalize Boeing and then fire anyone they want. But this is a pretty big hammer, that comes at a price (and who really believes, the government will be more efficient at running Boeing?)
>NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams...will get a ride [back] on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon in February. It's an extremely unfortunate development for Boeing
That's not an unfortunate development at all. The decision to not risk human lives is based on what's already happened, it's not a new happening. If Starliner comes back successfully/safely, that will be a plus, and if it doesn't, that will be a new minus.
The Soyuz-MS which is currently on its 15th successful launch (prior to that had 1 abort without injury)? Versus Starliner which has ostensibly failed 2 out of it's 3 orbital flights to date, not to mention being scrubbed on the pad for critical valve issues and failing to open 1 out of 3 parachutes on its debut launch.
After seeing what they are doing with their commercial planes and now Starliner I can't even imagine how screwed up the defense projects are. The NASA stuff is in the public so there is some accountability. Defense on the other hand is done in secret and everybody from Pentagon procurement people down to the defense contractor have every incentive and the ability to cover up problems.
I wonder if there's some price at which Boeing could buy a license to fork the current SpaceX technology. From there they could take it in different directions if they wanted, or pay some ongoing license fee for updates & training from SpaceX. Seems like it would be very beneficial for them to start with a platform that is known to work fairly well.
First, I don't understand why the two astronauts are going to be stranded for months. After the Columbia disaster, NASA adopted a policy where another Shuttle could be scrambled if a rescue mission as required. Shuttles took a lot of processing between missions. Replacing tiles, inspecting engines, that sort of thing. The report after Columbia showed that it might have been possible to scramble another Shuttle but the timeline was super tight. NASA decided not to repeat that mistake.
So here we are where an 8 day mission turns into a 6 month mission because NASA (via SpaceX )doesn't have a backup? How did that happen?
It's also worth noting that Crew Dragon can be configured for 6 passengers. NASA uses a 4 passenger configuration because there's simply no need for a 6 person configuration... except for now.
It may actually end up being cheaper for Boeing to simply return the money (or negotiate a partial return) and throw up the white flag. Boeing is in such a terrible state. It's simply coasting on earlier successes and airlines being locked in to the 737 type rating.
Because they're not "stranded" they're just doing a slightly extended otherwise normal mission rather than a brief test mission. There's no problem with that.
There is no emergency here. There's no need to scramble anything so they will ride home on February having spent 8 months up sharing a Dragon ride down with a crew that spent 6 months up. No big deal. The ISS crew appreciates the extra help around the shop right now. Butch and Suni want to be in space -- that's why they're astronauts, so they're not suffering. The only people suffering are their families and Boeing stockholders.
Dragon cannot be configured with 6 seats. The 7 seat configuration was rejected by NASA because of g-forces and the vehicles are now solidly 4 seaters and you certainly can't add two more seats to the Crew Dragon that's already up there so you wait on the next one to arrive on its regular schedule minus two of its crew so Suni and Butch can use those seats. Also, they need to send up Dragon suits as the Starliner suits can't be plugged into Dragon so even if they sat on the floor of the already up there Dragon for the ride home, they still couldn't jack in and that's only going to happen if there's a genuine emergency -- which there is not.
You make a lot of seemingly confident, but wrong assertions here. I suggest moderating that certainty until you know more about the subject.
Aren't there some questions about its capabilities because they seemed unable to do certain unmanned tests and there was speculation that they may have removed some of the autonomous software capabilities.
No, they're not sure, which is why they're not putting people on it.
It cannot currently get back on its own, but the capability exists. It's a software fix. They will try, which might even work. If it does it might even salvage the project. If it doesn't...
> Instead, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who flew up on the troubled capsule — will get a ride on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon in February.
(At first I didn't think this could really work, until I realized the second craft could have been towed up by the first.)
Incredible kudos to SpaceX, when you consider its comparable competitors repeatedly fumble (Boeing), move slow (Blue Origin), lost their edge (Russia), fidget spinner themselves out of relevance (ULA, Arianespace, Orbital Sciences), whiffed (Sea Launch), or very "successfully" build, launch and discard fortunes (er, flights) for the purpose of justifying those same flights (er, fortunes) (NASA).
Kudos to China too for some prolonged and relatively rapid progress. It will be interesting to see how that progress continues given the "Coolish War" we are now in.