Musings of a minor megalomaniac
Just On Stuff. Been talking about it since before I retired from USAF. Been writing about it for at least a couple years. The last conversation I had with a Boeing employee was standing in front of a comm rack at the SBIRS facility in Boulder. We’d been waiting for new links to go live …
Oh, they didn’t want to hear it. The only thing they wanted to hear is how fast the planes can get out the door. And so that was their metric. And, unfortunately, it’s the same metric today. We have seen this for the last six years. You don’t need me to list it out, just …
It’s like Boeing is ≈ Trump in terms of accountability. They fly 737s full of people into the ground, egregiously ripping off the government time and again, and the Air Force just begs for more. Everybody concerned with the topic understands the criticality of in-flight re-fueling. I guess they just overlooked the part about R&D …
I’ll take a wild-assed guess and surmise the main reason for the rear vision system failure was pretty simple and easily avoided. My hindsight is after all, 20/20. It was deemed too expensive to put the boomer in the back where they belong, opting rather for a more profitable, easy electro-digital solution. If it ain’t …
Give Butch and Suni something to do on a spacewalk. “…affected thrusters are attached to Starliner’s service module, which is designed to separate from the crew module during re-entry and burn up…”
This is a question alot of people working at Boeing and Space-X get paid handsomely to answer on a near-daily basis. I’ve worked on both sides of the government/contractor fence on more than one space program, so I have a basic familiarity with how they operate. Space is a realm with alot of unknowns. Like …
Tesla’s been doing it for years. Is this what all the vague, evasive NASA PR is all about? If so, it’s time to break up Boeing. There’s obviously something seriously wrong in the software development process, overall. “Starliner was designed as a spacecraft to have the crew in the cockpit,” NASA Commercial Crew program manager …
I stopped doing it sometime around the turn of the century. Parts were just too expensive and hard to come by in England. But you shouldn’t really expect it, unless you’re driving old, high-mileage equipment. People complain about the cost of auto repairs, but they’ll never appreciate it until attempting some themselves. Most never do. …
Like a compressed spring, the Starliner is readied for launch. The star imagery gets lost on me. We’re burning more hydrocarbons than an entire small town uses to heat their homes all winter just reaching orbit in one shot. Then comes a crewed Starship, at some point soon. The Boeing vs. Space-X saga continues, with …
Much as I hate Boeing for flying into the ground and banking truckloads of ill-gotten government gain, you gotta give ’em a break on this one. We can be sure it’s down to the last grease monkey turning a wrench on those door bolts – likely forgetting to do so properly, skipping the Loctite™, whatever. …
Budget is really the only tool the government wields in these conflicts. As usual, the impact will be to just make it worse. Schedule moves right, cost goes up, quality and predictability go down. It’s an oft-repeated refrain in the defense contracting business and we are doing it to ourselves. Maybe Boeing will think it …
…will go down in history as the greatest humanitarian airlift effort ever, eclipsing the Berlin Airlift tonnage by an order of magnitude in human cargo. We can debate the comparison in tons of coal and food vs. people. It’s apples and oranges. This one has a deadline and DoD is meeting it in spectacular fashion. …
As a retired military member, I probably have a little better understanding of the “disaster” thing. That is after all, pretty much the military’s whole reason for being: creating violent disasters of the most unimaginable kind, and attempting to protect themselves from the same. With modern medical and airlift technology, evacuating and caring for the …
We can be confident people in this group will constitute a large cross-section of PedoPoseurdom demographics: Criminally negligent corporate executives and everyone else who gets a kick out of violating the public trust. I suppose low-level types like this could be given a parole option. The biggest swath from that bunch will be the typically …
Falcon Heavy just opened a new outer space chapter, with exactly the right point of emphasis. It’s Space-X and Musk all the way – no government B$ to muddy up this rocket program: The level of achievement here is massively impressive considering guaranteed profit scams sheltered by government regulation and unfair trade practices are the …