Boeing vs. SpaceX: A 'How It Started vs. How It's Going' Tale of Space Race Promises
Description
A 'How it started vs. How it's going' meme format contrasting aerospace giants Boeing and SpaceX. The 'How it started' panel on the left displays a December 2017 tweet from Fortune Tech quoting the Boeing CEO: 'We're Going to Beat Elon Musk to Mars'. Below are replies from Elon Musk saying 'Do it' and The Boeing Company stating 'Game on!'. The 'How it's going' panel on the right shows a recent tweet from August 2024 announcing that NASA will use a SpaceX Dragon capsule to bring back astronauts from the ISS because 'Boeing's Starliner capsule will no longer be used to bring them back', accompanied by an image of the SpaceX capsule. The technical context is a stark illustration of the difference between corporate pronouncements and engineering reality. It highlights the failure of a legacy enterprise (Boeing) to deliver on an ambitious project (Starliner, a precursor to Mars ambitions), while its more agile competitor (SpaceX) not only succeeded with its own program but was ultimately called upon to rescue the former's mission. For senior engineers, this is a classic case study in corporate hubris, the perils of technical debt, and the disruption of established industries by nimble, engineering-focused companies. It's a powerful commentary on how execution and delivering a working product will always trump marketing and bold claims
Comments
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Boeing's Starliner project is the perfect enterprise legacy system: it has critical bugs, it's not delivering, and now they need a startup to write a migration plan for its users
“We’ll beat SpaceX to Mars” was the aerospace version of a VP promising Kubernetes in Q3 - six years and seven slip charts later, we’re paging Dragon for the rollback
Boeing's Starliner is like that legacy codebase that passed all unit tests in dev but somehow manages to throw a NullPointerException in prod - except this time the pointer is literally pointing to space and the exception leaves astronauts stranded
Boeing's approach to beating SpaceX to Mars perfectly demonstrates the difference between waterfall and agile: they spent seven years planning the announcement while SpaceX iterated their way to actually flying the mission. Turns out 'Game on!' is not a valid project delivery methodology, and Elon's 'Do it' was less trash talk and more of a code review comment that Boeing failed to address. Classic case of confusing a press release with a product roadmap - at least their Starliner had the decency to fail in LEO rather than interplanetary space
Boeing's Starliner: waterfall roadmap to Mars since 2017, now a flaming hotfix PR from SpaceX's infinite sprint velocity
Procurement said “game on,” but seven years later the incident bridge picked the capsule with an SLO and an MTBF histogram, not the one with the keynote
ADR-042: replace Starliner with Dragon because SLAs beat press releases - never confuse roadmap tweets with production readiness
Tbh I'd be scared to fly either in Boeing or SpaceX stuff xd Comment deleted
SpaceX has all the necessary acreditations and has more successful launches than Boeing. I'm betting on SpaceX now. Comment deleted
You can have all the accreditations in the world but you still need to manufacture stuff that works reliably and SpaceX isn't exactly great at that. I don't know much about rocket stuff but from what I've heard SpaceX isn't really all that great and are in the process of reinventing everything from the last 50 years. And they suck even at that if you compare how such projects from 50 years ago went. Comment deleted
dude... NOBODY before them made re-usable rockets. Even space shuttle used expendable ones. The need to reinvent because of different goals. Comment deleted
Neither did SpaceX. What's reusable about them? Comment deleted
The falcon series can be repaired and reused, vs sold for scrap Comment deleted
Yeah that is the whole point of them landing themselves lol Comment deleted
Yup, and it looks cool, especially when they did the falcon heavy launch and multiple landed simultaneously Comment deleted
Was this ever actually done? Comment deleted
So you didn’t knew that there’s boosters which were already reused DOZENS time? Gotcha, Internet be Internet Comment deleted
Lmfao Comment deleted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_development_program Comment deleted
I wouldn't bet on anything muskrat runs lolol Comment deleted
You suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome. Please seek help. Comment deleted
Ah yes, anybody who disagrees with the rat must be ill. Ok Comment deleted
You are sick from hatred. Calling the dude "rat" and claiming everything of his is bad. No need to agree to everything but damn, give the man credit where it's due. Comment deleted
Credit for what lmao Comment deleted
For making retards around the world seethe with rage for one 🤣 Comment deleted
Oh yeah, he's master troll in Chief. That makes him super duper qualified to do anything! Comment deleted
This right here. Musk is so incredibly irresponsible and foolish. Boeing gave up the Engineering centric leadership and it shows. Fuck both for passenger centric items Comment deleted
I dislike Elon but you can't deny what the company is doing is beneficial Comment deleted
https://youtu.be/1AXnMlxK22A?si=ot_nPf7WSgsX6Xnb Comment deleted
Their testing with the barge landing probably helped a lot for maintaining control at low speeds Comment deleted
Their crew capsule is designed to separate from the rocket in the event of a failure and propel itself away, though it hasn't been tested in an emergency yet Comment deleted
Yes, many times Comment deleted
The first falcon heavy launch was all reused boosters Comment deleted
Their starlink launches are reused rockets Comment deleted
According to Wikipedia the most a booster was reused was 22 flights Comment deleted
By 2020, only five of the 26 Falcon 9 launched that year used new boosters. By 2021, only two of the 31 Falcon 9 launches used new boosters. Comment deleted
That's not great tbh Comment deleted
I've read that at this point it was more economical to just use the space shuttle Comment deleted
It costs $450 million to launch the space shuttle Comment deleted
what's not great? 2 out of 31 launches used new boosters, all others were re-used. Comment deleted
Compared to others which can only be reused once? Comment deleted
Yes Comment deleted
Actually yes Comment deleted
In 2023 they had 96 successful launches with the falcon 9. All successful Comment deleted
TLDR: Elon sucks, SpaceX good, starlink sucks Comment deleted
How tf starlinks became "sucks"? 😂 Comment deleted
It sucks for the people who thought it was super high end laser beam for everyday consumer Comment deleted
I see, thanks I remember the idea of Low-orbits circling around since 2000s but no other company had guts to went all-in on that one Google was so desperate that last iteration of that idea was with balloons 😂 Comment deleted
Afaik its not profitable Comment deleted
It sucks for anything which keeps a connection open, like games or downloads. Every 75 seconds you change satellites. It's also not viable for households with multiple active devices as the latency will increase quite a bit. Comment deleted
Did you own one? Thats not how it works... there will be barely any interuptions. The app uses camera and TeslaBS vision to see of the sky is clear anought (aka no tress or such) Comment deleted
used it for about a year Comment deleted
I thought games use udp Comment deleted
Depends Comment deleted
It's more like TCP over UDP in competitive games Comment deleted
yeah like that Comment deleted
It basically can start a cascade effect on the orbit which will destroy all our devices over there and prevent us from any space launches for a looooong time. Also, starlink gives like nothing new. We already have satellite internet, and it uses much less satellites (a handful for a more classical high orbit one vs 6000 by now for this garbage). Yes ping sucks, but it sucks with starlink as well, the goal to make a "space internet" with ping comparable to landline is a futile goal, and Elon taking that goal itself tell a lot about his "engineering" qualities. Not to say about that irony of "space visionary" severing the humanity from the space itself Comment deleted
how much is the ping you get with starlink? Comment deleted
I don't have starlink, so I cannot tell for sure but the internet says anything between 20 and 100ms. Not so bad, but those sites seem suspicious and I don't think it really worth the possible Kessler Effect Comment deleted
dude if I ever get that ping it would be my luckiest day Comment deleted
The only other reusable booster is Rocket Lab's Electron. They have had 2 successful retrievals so far Comment deleted
Though Electron is for a small launch vehicle while falcon 9 is a medium launch vehicle Comment deleted
Ohh cool graphic Comment deleted
dragon deez nuts Comment deleted
How it started: Boeing will do it. 😎 How it's going: Space-X will do it. 🚀 How it will actually be done: by Russia, or China, or whoever else... 😱 Comment deleted
Sir, please, no 😭 Comment deleted
Let's do a gentelman's bet on that. I'm betting on SpaceX. Comment deleted
Just in time. 😅 https://spacenews.com/falcon-9-booster-lost-in-rare-unsuccessful-landing/ Comment deleted
Still betting on SpaceX. 316 landings for 321 attempts with this failure being first in couple years. Which other company does successful orbital flights with re-used boosters? Comment deleted
Btw it was a 23rd flight of that booster Comment deleted
Lovely one, thanks for sharing! Comment deleted