The article makes it sound like each day it takes until Starship can fly a crew is another day Starliner lives on.
Would this make Starliner the first capsule to actually outlive its launcher?
I have serious doubts whether Starliner will ever carry crew again.
It’s just not needed at this point. Fly them as cargo to ‘fulfill’ obligations, and fly a few more Dragons.
And despite the use of Starliner in promotional material for various commercial space stations, it seems even more unlikely that Starliner will ever fly for a commercial customer:
It’s price would likely be unreasonable in comparison to the competition,
Crews would likely prefer the more reliable and proven Dragon,
There won’t be any boosters available to launch it (Atlas V out of production and all boosters spoken for), No-one is likely to want to eat the cost of certifying it on another booster option,
BO and RL crew capsules might be available sooner (I jest… a little).
Starliner would be a very expensive and wasteful cargo system. It wouldn’t be able to deliver as much cargo as Cargo Dragon (no trunk, for one thing) and the cost per mission would likely be about three times as much. The cost of the Atlas V N22 alone is likely much higher than a Cargo Dragon flying on a flight-proven Falcon 9. Boeing might be able to save some money by leaving off the LES, but they’d still have to build another service module for each flight.
Agree 100%. But politics, Boeing lobbying, and so forth means it’s unrealistic to expect the program to just be cut.
Starliner carries the added expense of needing to cross-train crews on Dragon for the return flight. ^_^
If it was the only capsule program going, I could see it getting through its teething problems, similar to Apollo. But at this point I just don’t see it ever becoming a workhorse, which is what it would need to do to get past its bad reputation.
My gut impression is that it was designed under the helm of an engineering B team who lacked clarity and got lost in the weeds on many points. Fixing its problems is merely patching over those fundamental missteps and oversights and hoping there’s not more problems lurking underneath.
George, are you sure they put anyone as good as the B team on it?
Not really. They had a bunch of Indian programmers. I ran some numbers on the number of CS/programming degrees India is producing annually versus the number of open slots in Indian computer science and engineering majors, and the numbers aren’t even remotely close.
As a sample I picked their 9th largest university, the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, which has an enrollment of 260,000. That’s about 6% of India’s top 12 unversity enrollment. The B.Tech. in CS and Engineering is a four year program that costs about $1,500.
So when I check their college of engineering course for 2025, it says:
In the stream of Engineering, Rajiv Gandhi College of Engineering and Technology offers a B.E. /B.Tech programme to the students. Offered at the UG level, this course is offered for a duration of 3 – 4 years. …Admissions are based on student’s performance in the CENTAC examination. The college offers an intake capacity of 390 seats to the students.
So if that university, which is a technical university, is an example, they’re enrolling about 65,000 students per year, but only 390 students a year should be comin out of their CS/engineering program. Since that university is about 6% of their largest universities, the big ones are likely only producing about 6,500 legitimate CS degrees per year. But other sources say India graduates 600,000 to 800,000 CS and IT graduates a year.
So my estimate, based on the number of seats in the CS/engineering courses at a technical university, is apparently off by a factor of 100.
But there’s an ongoing and major scandal in Indian universities. It seems that instead of spending four years and $1,500 getting a degree, you can just pay a professor or administrator far less than that to just get a degree without having to show up or do anything. There have been arrests of “diploma mills” which were creating fake diplomas and the associated records for cash. And not just for programming or engineering, but for law, medicine, or anything else. And the scandal spans many universities.
The fake diploma gets an Indian into the head-hunter pipeline and lands them a job in the US, and if they work their way up they bring in more Indians with fake degrees, creating entire departments inside a company that are filled with people who don’t actually know what they’re doing, and they all just fake it as they learn on the job.
And there’s no way for us to detect the fraud. Heck, we didn’t even suspect it was going on. Who knows which programmers are real and which are just randos looking to make a buck off unsuspecting companies till they get caught out and fired, and then move on to some other unsuspecting US company, or move back to India with a pile of American money?
And of course if you outsource programming work to India, Lord only knows who ends up doing it.
So I might be inclined to question any software that Boeing has outsourced to India, or has had done by Indian hires in the US. Heck, I’m not even getting to the question of competence as a programmer, I’m questioning whether they’re even programmers, at least to the extent that the term refers to someone who isn’t just pretending to know how to program.
But what will really keep you up at night is wondering about Indian doctors and nurses, and whether any of them are fakes, too.
After dealing with a few engineers from what I’ll call the second world, what you say sounds very likely. The vibe of someone trying to operate far over his head is unmistakable.
In dealing with a few engineers from the “first” world, I sometimes wonder if the fake degrees are almost as good. Construction blueprints from some that obviously don’t know the basics.
This suggest it’s bad now…
But as LLM usage increases, it will becoming increasingly easy for people in all manner of places to fake all kinds of documents, experience, etc.
Finding the ‘real deal’ is going to be incredibly difficult unless it’s something tangible you can examine for yourself (ie I built this airplane in my garage and it didn’t kill me).
As I recall, that’s exactly how Mike Melvil came to be Scaled Composites’ first astronaut.
Need a job? We’re in hanger #3 at the Mohave Airport. Come fly in during the week and we’ll talk… If you fly in in your own home-built plane, we’ll give you priority….
BTW I pulled the hangar number out of my you know what. Besides, how do you know I was referring to Scaled Composites?
It’s all nonsense. Too little too late. Many companies are racing to catch up with SpaceX. Meanwhile these people are staring at a pile of obsolete and flawed equipment, hoping their buddies in the gov will do them a solid that will hold them over for a few more years.
One thing these old capsules could be used for is launch/EDL crew cabins for Starship in its early days. There’s at least 15 assorted Dragons, Starliners. and Orions. Dragon as is could do a zero/zero abort. The rest would need some solids below or around the cabin.
“However, there are some questions about SpaceX’s long-term plans for the Dragon program, and those concerns didn’t suddenly spring up last month, when SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk suggested on X that SpaceX would “immediately” begin winding down the Dragon program.”
It was funny how many people believed this. Guys, don’t be so retarded. Take a few breaths and calm down. Catch a bubble as they say.
I don’t know what will happen with Starliner but absent anyone in government taking our debt seriously, it will likely continue but doubtful it will close any business cases outside of purchasing influence and not just a ride.
People are worried about Dragon but here is the thing, as long as SpaceX makes a profit on Dragon, they will continue offering it. Ever dollar they make helps them achieve their larger goal.
The article makes it sound like each day it takes until Starship can fly a crew is another day Starliner lives on.
Would this make Starliner the first capsule to actually outlive its launcher?
I have serious doubts whether Starliner will ever carry crew again.
It’s just not needed at this point. Fly them as cargo to ‘fulfill’ obligations, and fly a few more Dragons.
And despite the use of Starliner in promotional material for various commercial space stations, it seems even more unlikely that Starliner will ever fly for a commercial customer:
It’s price would likely be unreasonable in comparison to the competition,
Crews would likely prefer the more reliable and proven Dragon,
There won’t be any boosters available to launch it (Atlas V out of production and all boosters spoken for), No-one is likely to want to eat the cost of certifying it on another booster option,
BO and RL crew capsules might be available sooner (I jest… a little).
Starliner would be a very expensive and wasteful cargo system. It wouldn’t be able to deliver as much cargo as Cargo Dragon (no trunk, for one thing) and the cost per mission would likely be about three times as much. The cost of the Atlas V N22 alone is likely much higher than a Cargo Dragon flying on a flight-proven Falcon 9. Boeing might be able to save some money by leaving off the LES, but they’d still have to build another service module for each flight.
Agree 100%. But politics, Boeing lobbying, and so forth means it’s unrealistic to expect the program to just be cut.
Starliner carries the added expense of needing to cross-train crews on Dragon for the return flight. ^_^
If it was the only capsule program going, I could see it getting through its teething problems, similar to Apollo. But at this point I just don’t see it ever becoming a workhorse, which is what it would need to do to get past its bad reputation.
My gut impression is that it was designed under the helm of an engineering B team who lacked clarity and got lost in the weeds on many points. Fixing its problems is merely patching over those fundamental missteps and oversights and hoping there’s not more problems lurking underneath.
George, are you sure they put anyone as good as the B team on it?
Not really. They had a bunch of Indian programmers. I ran some numbers on the number of CS/programming degrees India is producing annually versus the number of open slots in Indian computer science and engineering majors, and the numbers aren’t even remotely close.
As a sample I picked their 9th largest university, the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, which has an enrollment of 260,000. That’s about 6% of India’s top 12 unversity enrollment. The B.Tech. in CS and Engineering is a four year program that costs about $1,500.
So when I check their college of engineering course for 2025, it says:
So if that university, which is a technical university, is an example, they’re enrolling about 65,000 students per year, but only 390 students a year should be comin out of their CS/engineering program. Since that university is about 6% of their largest universities, the big ones are likely only producing about 6,500 legitimate CS degrees per year. But other sources say India graduates 600,000 to 800,000 CS and IT graduates a year.
So my estimate, based on the number of seats in the CS/engineering courses at a technical university, is apparently off by a factor of 100.
But there’s an ongoing and major scandal in Indian universities. It seems that instead of spending four years and $1,500 getting a degree, you can just pay a professor or administrator far less than that to just get a degree without having to show up or do anything. There have been arrests of “diploma mills” which were creating fake diplomas and the associated records for cash. And not just for programming or engineering, but for law, medicine, or anything else. And the scandal spans many universities.
The fake diploma gets an Indian into the head-hunter pipeline and lands them a job in the US, and if they work their way up they bring in more Indians with fake degrees, creating entire departments inside a company that are filled with people who don’t actually know what they’re doing, and they all just fake it as they learn on the job.
And there’s no way for us to detect the fraud. Heck, we didn’t even suspect it was going on. Who knows which programmers are real and which are just randos looking to make a buck off unsuspecting companies till they get caught out and fired, and then move on to some other unsuspecting US company, or move back to India with a pile of American money?
And of course if you outsource programming work to India, Lord only knows who ends up doing it.
So I might be inclined to question any software that Boeing has outsourced to India, or has had done by Indian hires in the US. Heck, I’m not even getting to the question of competence as a programmer, I’m questioning whether they’re even programmers, at least to the extent that the term refers to someone who isn’t just pretending to know how to program.
But what will really keep you up at night is wondering about Indian doctors and nurses, and whether any of them are fakes, too.
After dealing with a few engineers from what I’ll call the second world, what you say sounds very likely. The vibe of someone trying to operate far over his head is unmistakable.
In dealing with a few engineers from the “first” world, I sometimes wonder if the fake degrees are almost as good. Construction blueprints from some that obviously don’t know the basics.
This suggest it’s bad now…
But as LLM usage increases, it will becoming increasingly easy for people in all manner of places to fake all kinds of documents, experience, etc.
Finding the ‘real deal’ is going to be incredibly difficult unless it’s something tangible you can examine for yourself (ie I built this airplane in my garage and it didn’t kill me).
As I recall, that’s exactly how Mike Melvil came to be Scaled Composites’ first astronaut.
Need a job? We’re in hanger #3 at the Mohave Airport. Come fly in during the week and we’ll talk… If you fly in in your own home-built plane, we’ll give you priority….
BTW I pulled the hangar number out of my you know what. Besides, how do you know I was referring to Scaled Composites?
It’s all nonsense. Too little too late. Many companies are racing to catch up with SpaceX. Meanwhile these people are staring at a pile of obsolete and flawed equipment, hoping their buddies in the gov will do them a solid that will hold them over for a few more years.
One thing these old capsules could be used for is launch/EDL crew cabins for Starship in its early days. There’s at least 15 assorted Dragons, Starliners. and Orions. Dragon as is could do a zero/zero abort. The rest would need some solids below or around the cabin.
“However, there are some questions about SpaceX’s long-term plans for the Dragon program, and those concerns didn’t suddenly spring up last month, when SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk suggested on X that SpaceX would “immediately” begin winding down the Dragon program.”
It was funny how many people believed this. Guys, don’t be so retarded. Take a few breaths and calm down. Catch a bubble as they say.
I don’t know what will happen with Starliner but absent anyone in government taking our debt seriously, it will likely continue but doubtful it will close any business cases outside of purchasing influence and not just a ride.
People are worried about Dragon but here is the thing, as long as SpaceX makes a profit on Dragon, they will continue offering it. Ever dollar they make helps them achieve their larger goal.