Dear readers,
Welcome to Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extraterrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: The culture that is Starliner, Starship goes pop, and NASA’s China fixation.
🚀 🚀 🚀
Boeing has problems building a new Starliner spacecraft for NASA, and it has problems making its jetliner 737 Max safe enough for commercial service. It has insisted these problems are unrelated.
Now, though, the company has the same solution to both issues—a new “product and services safety organization reporting directly to our chief engineer.” This reorganization was announced by since-departed CEO Dennis Muilenberg last fall in response to concerns over the safety of the 737 Max, and Boeing says it was always intended to reach across the whole company.
This brings us to the C-word—culture—that has dominated discussion of the aerospace giant since the tragic crashes of the 737 Max. It represents the question: Were these individual mistakes made while developing complex technology, or fundamental flaws in how the company approaches engineering problems?
Boeing vice president John Mulholland told reporters last week about the decisions that led to Starliner’s problems, particularly a choice not to run comprehensive, integrated tests on the spacecraft and the Atlas V rocket that carried it to orbit. Instead, engineers broke the mission into chunks to avoid a 25-hour long marathon. Unfortunately, splitting up the test led them to miss the key error that prevented the spacecraft from knowing the right time to fire its own engines and head for the International Space Station (ISS).
In another error that violated the old saw of “test like you fly,” Boeing trialed its flight software on a device called an emulator—but the test device used in the lab was configured differently than the hardware used in-flight. The company’s engineers caught and corrected this error—which might have caused the spacecraft to crash into the trunk it jettisons before returning to Earth—during the test.
Reporters asked for more context about how these flawed test programs originated, but didn’t receive a direct answer. Mulholland did say that cost was not a factor. “I really don’t want you or anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts,” he said. “They did an abundance of testing, and in certain areas, we have gaps to go fill.”
On March 6, NASA and Boeing will share the results of an independent review of the failed test, and perhaps more specifics will be forthcoming.
In the wake of the 737 Max debacle, a chorus of voices pointed to the increasing primacy of financial considerations over engineering, symbolized by Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas in the late 1990s and the movement of its headquarters from Seattle, home of its airline manufacturing business, to Chicago, home of its airline clients.
One Boeing spacecraft engineer who worked at the company during those years told me about “people tweaking the metrics so everything is green, but they’re pushing the problems off into the future.” He compared the situation, ironically, to Boeing executive Alan Mulally’s turn as CEO of Ford motors, where one of his main accomplishments was simply getting executives to admit that problems existed using “stoplight charts.”
It makes me wonder if, today, there is a reluctance to say “something’s wrong” at Boeing. In the last several years, Starliner executives have insisted that Boeing already knows what it takes to go into space—they’ve worked on everything from the Shuttle to the ISS, after all. But the “we’ve done it all before” attitude might not drive the kind of relentless questioning that makes for a safe vehicle.
“Our culture is centered around the strong shared values of safety, quality and integrity,” a Boeing spokesperson told me when I asked if complacency was a concern. “We’re learning and changing our processes with a focus on safety company wide.”
At least there’s an example for Boeing to follow in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. After that company’s first major launch failure in 2016 cost them a rocket and NASA confidence, chief engineer Hans Koenigsmann led a reorganization to create a new reliability organization within SpaceX, including opening up the company’s “state-of-the-art” (pdf) systems engineering software to NASA engineers for deeper oversight.
🌘 🌘 🌘
Imagery Interlude
It doesn’t get as much attention as Starliner or SpaceX’s Dragon, but Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft is pretty cool. I guess I’m just a sucker for symmetrical solar panels. The uncrewed vehicle is now in regular use ferrying supplies and experiments up to the ISS.
This year, at NASA’s request, Northrop was able to launch two of these vehicles within three months, about twice as fast as their normal cadence.
🚨 Read this 🚨
Even STEM graduates know—a college education can’t guarantee success in the digital economy. So what can? Quartz’s Michael J. Coren reports on the challenge to transform education and close the widening gap between a slow-moving higher ed system and a fast-moving economy—without miring students in debt.
🚀 🚀 🚀
SPACE DEBRIS
Psyche! NASA has hired SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to fly a mission to a heavy metal asteroid in 2022. The use of the privately-developed rocket, the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will cost NASA just $117 million. It’s the first time the space agency has bought one of Musk’s triple-booster vehicles; its main customer so far has been the US Air Force, which typically flies massive, complex spacecraft that need the extra power.
Red Eye. Last week, my colleague Justin Rohrlich and I were among the first to report on a scientist hired as a NASA subcontractor who lied about his work for a Beijing university, a contravention of the US space agency’s ban on cooperating with China. NASA didn’t have any comment on the scientist’s indictment, but today administrator Jim Bridenstine will speak at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the “Strategic Implications of NASA’s Moon to Mars Plan.” The choice of topic reflects the increasingly blurry lines between America’s civil space agency and its national security, which, incidentally, is the primary reason NASA isn’t allowed to work with China’s space agency.
Building a rocket: Indoors. Relativity Space, the 3D printing-focused launch vehicle company that has raised an impressive amount of money and collected a team of veteran engineers, now has a massive Long Beach factory all its own. Ars Technica’s Eric Berger popped down to Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where Relativity is testing its rocket motors, for a comprehensive look at what all the fuss is about.
Building a rocket: Outdoors. A prototype of SpaceX’s next-generation reusable spacecraft suffered significant damage during a pressure test at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas. A similar accident in November 2019 delayed the company’s plans for suborbital test flights, but Musk says a new prototype, Serial Number 2, will soon be ready to enter testing as the company iterates its design and manufacturing plans.
SAR, Raaar! PredaSAR, a company with a name designed to appeal to people who overuse the word “lethality,” raised a $25 million seed round to build what it hopes will be the world’s largest space radar constellation. Founder and chairman Marc Bell hired Roger Teague, a former US Air Force general and Boeing executive, to be the new company’s CEO. Space radar is an increasingly crowded sector, so it will be interesting to see if this new entrant can win military money away from space radar concerns with a bigger head start.
Your pal,
Tim
This was issue 37 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your best SAR puns, theories of NASA’s geopolitical role, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.