Space

I'm just saying they both did what they set out to do. They both clearly have their own issues to deal with still, but it was a good day!

Totally agreed, Starliner has had an expensive disaster of a project timeline. But, it finally brought astronauts to the ISS, today's mission was a success! Likewise, Starship made it through reentry mostly intact this time! It's an exciting day for spaceflight!

Let's remember that the first falcon launch didn't get to the desired orbit because of a fuel leak. The first starship launch had a giant number of problems.

To be fair though, since we're comparing them, Starship is also not exactly on schedule and it's starting to result in canceled missions.

Starliner successfully docked to a space station to deliver crew, a feat first achieved in 1971.

Starship flew into space and crashed, a feat first achieved in 1944.

Nobody broke any big milestones, both were just test flights, that are both horribly behind their promised time-frames.

This is because of the fundamental structure of Boeing versus SpaceX.

Boeing has largely converted to corporate structure with lots of bean counters who look to commodify many of their projects when the industry in which they work in is absolutely not one that can be done as such. SpaceX is mostly engineers running the program who take each project as an engineering project and not an assembly line looking to be optimized.

This has lead to a lot of broken production communication. Because with Starliner, you might have Bob here that works specifically on getting some coolant line put in. But Bob has zero understanding of the grander picture here. Why is this coolant line being put in here? Then some module will go in over that line, again Sue only knows that she needs to install the module, not understanding anything before or after her step.

Then next thing you know, that coolant line's vibration causes stress when up against the module that causes micro-cracks in the line causing leaks for helium gas. Because at no point did anyone see their part and how it worked with the whole. Nor was anyone along the way knowledgeable enough to know the ramifications of specific engineering designs.

Which might have you ask, what about the engineers? Again, it's all compartments and budget constraints. Assumptions that are made about design that aren't correct assumptions but no one knows they aren't correct because some bean counter wants Mary the engineer to shave as much cost off her design for her module, not knowing how any of those redesigns will out with any other redesign that's also being implemented.

Boeing from ground up is not built to handle the task they are being given. There's too few engineers, too many corporate shills, and too many barriers between departments to facilitate the kind of communication that's required to build the same thing SpaceX does for Dragon. And the thing is, Boeing will just deploy the bean counters to see if they can find the issue, when it's the folks sending the corporate and the corporate themselves that's the problem. They are never going to solve their issues.

At the same time, none of this goes unnoticed by Boeing employees. It's pretty demoralizing watching hard work not work correctly. Then have the corporate pull everyone into a room and explain "what happened?" Then the finger pointing happens and nothing gets solved, rinse and repeat till your nerves are frayed beyond belief.

The employees and the engineers to get this kind of work done is there. There's just this whole corporate layer that's not needed that make everything 10,000% worse. Yes, there needs to be leadership, but the layers of operations that Boeing adds to the process is just people trying to enrich themselves.

I don't think so, I think it will be a blip in everyone's feeds. For NASA they built their program on the country's involvement, because that's how they got funding, and so there was an emotional attachment and involvement. SpaceX is background noise for the majority of people, they could have people dying left and right and it probably wouldn't be a big deal.