Stick a fork in them,
they're done:
Starliner program manager John Mulholland has revealed at a teleconference that the company thought it would be “more logical to break the mission phases into chunks and do a lot of testing in those smaller chunks.” Doing a single test run from launch to docking takes over 25 hours, after all.
... Testing individual components is an important step in the testing process. But after you get all those parts approved, you have to test the whole assembly.
Sometimes, things just don’t fit together and interact the way you expect them to and it’s not until you test the assembly that you figure that out. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve experienced that.
It's Dilbert building spaceships.
Boeing Mgt and QC going on out there is INSANE
ReplyDeleteIt's a sure sign of the death of the company by 'Taj Mahal Headquarters.'
ReplyDeleteSeriously. I have seen reports where company execs of other companies have crowed about building a Taj Mahal building and were excited about it. Without understanding that said Taj Mahal is a frickin tomb!
Translate: We're putting our new HQ in a Mausoleum.
Boeing? Moved into a Mausoleum in Chicago, where no production exists. Moving to Marietta, GA? That would make sense, escaping the increasingly californiated Seattle and Washington State.
Want to see a space program that works? SpaceX. Well, we kinda figured our welding on Starship 1 was not up to snuf, which we proved by blowing it up. Reviewing every broken weld, and already are working on a fix.
Loss of one later gen Falcon 9 due to supercooling O2? Identified and fixed before NASA could schedule a conference room to start identifying the methods they (NASA) will use to set up a committee to...
What's the new phrase? If it's Boeing, it ain't going!
Space is hard.
One slip, one puncture by a drunken assembly worker and not pressure testing, like Russia did, can lead to a shutdown or to a major death-pressure incident.
One simple screwup and two astronauts have no suits to wear for an EVA. That has come out that NASA has no new EVA suits being built. All EVA suits are Shuttle-era. Nothing's been done to fix the suit issue. By NASA.
Little things. Little things like single o-rings can lead to death. Like faulty wiring, FOD damage inside and outside the spacecraft.
Boeing screwed up. Big. Used to support them. Now?
Yep, political move vs. common sense move, and now they are PAYING for it!
ReplyDeleteBoeing was a great aerospace engineering company that was wrecked by the MBAs and other business experts.
ReplyDeleteThey should hire someone to crucify Harry Stonecipher and hang his carcass in the boardroom pour encourager les autres.
Boeing is an example of why one should never put accountants and MBAs over engineers at, for all intensive purposes, an engineering company.
ReplyDeleteThere was a great article from years ago in THE ATLANTIC discussing the so-called Boeing takeover of McDonnell Douglas. It turned out Boeing payed for the assets and somehow all the MD execs ended up running Boeing and deciding to relocate away from the Seattle area and chose the nightlife of Chicago for their new HQ. It was a great article.
ReplyDeleteWe found on DD986 that the ship's computers could not actually run the Overall Combat System Operability Test because we could not physically load the entire program on the computers. For years ships of the class just gundecked it and went segment by segment each week. AAW, ASW, ASUW, EW, etc. Running it also required that all the divisions involved show up at the same time to run it and it took hours. I guess in the Spruance Class program it was kind of a standing joke.
Kind of like Boeing in both their air and space divisions.
And then, when an engineer says "this is going to cause a catastrophic failure in the field unless we fix and test it before shipment", the lead manager says "sorry, our budget won't permit fixing it now. We'll fix it in the field."
ReplyDeleteAnd we know, absolutely know that the engineer will be blamed for the failure. "You knew this would fail - why didn't you fix it???"
Good engineers have been slapped down so many times that they're gun-shy of saying anything.
1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
'"And then, when an engineer says "this is going to cause a catastrophic failure in the field unless we fix and test it before shipment", the lead manager says "sorry, our budget won't permit fixing it now. We'll fix it in the field."
ReplyDeleteAnd we know, absolutely know that the engineer will be blamed for the failure. "You knew this would fail - why didn't you fix it???"'
A lot of that in the "industrial wrecker" show trials of the 1930s (currently reading The Great Terror).