Boeing need to stop being given contracts, from the Starliner issues on top of the various scandals with the quality control of their planes, it's clear to see they have no value in human life.
Why does it feel like we don’t have criminal responsibility (well, accountability) here in the US? So much criminal wrongdoing and the company just pays a fine and everything continues as usual.
It doesn't feel like that. It is like that. Companies are their own entities, separate from the people that run them, and you can't put a company in jail. This muddies the water as to who can be held accountable and prosecuted.
Putting people in jail shouldn’t be an end goal. There are two reasons to jail a person:
1. Prohibit them from causing further harm.
2. Revenge.
The latter, I hope were better than that. And to prohibit the possible offenders here, no need to jail them. Just forbid them from serving in capacity that can cause such harm: bar them from serving in executive or decision making role.
Those are not the only reasons to put people in jail. There is also 3. Deterring others from similar actions, and 4. Rehabilitation.
Number 4 obviously doesn't apply in the US justice system, but number 3, deterrence, is imho the major argument for putting executives or employees in prison. The threat of punishment can be a strong motivator, especially in corporate settings. But it only works if punishments are actually delivered after someone crosses the line
Exactly, and the lack of deterrence is why corporate executives just do whatever they want as long as the fines aren't a significant amount compared to the profit from wrongdoing. I bet if prison time was actually on the table, we'd suddenly have corporate executives that acted ethically and within the law.
I think public floggings a laStarship Troopers would go a long way towards encouraging more social behavior. Much better than sending people to prison.
No really. There's been endless research on this, and increasing the magnitude of the punishment does very little to deter unwanted behaviors. Increasing the likelihood of getting caught does, though, even when the actual punishment for getting caught is relatively minor.
Which would seem to suggest that stuffing even more people into prisons may not help much; what we really need is to dial back some of the gutting of regulatory bodies that's made it so easy for corrupt behavior to flourish in the first place. Sunlight continues to be the best disinfectant.
And you can kind of see it on an international scale? The "better regulation" approach is favored by places like EU countries, while the "throw the leaders in jail" approach is more favored by places like Russia and China that don't exactly seem to be ideal role models for how to keep corporate corruption in check.
Companies are abstract legal entities, separate from the people who run them. Companies don't have a physical form that can be arrested and locked in a cell.
When a person is put in jail, they are not protected from their creditors. Very often their houses get foreclosed, assets sold, etc. This is considered to be a just part of the punishment.
The concept of corporate personhood is laughable when the most powerful method of coercion that the state has to ensure all people obey the law is completely inoperative for corporate people.
Why can't I just reincorporate myself as a Delaware C Corp, shoot up a school, and then pay a fine and walk away?
Oh but there are criminal justice consequences if you do something TO a corporation through. Kid get a 5 year sentence for setting fire to a Macdonald's dumpster. You read that correctly, he set outside garbage on fire and will be in jail for 5 years.
Considering that the "Kid" was a 34 year old employee, that seems like a totally reasonable sentence. If I was judge/jury, I would also give 5 year sentences to arsonists. This is psychotic behavior:
> Joshua Daryl McGregor, 34, was working at the restaurant on 2701 Montgomery Ave. in April 2023 when he became frustrated that the store was too busy
> McGregor lit a piece of cardboard on fire and threw it into the dumpster outside the restaurant that was already full of cardboard and other flammable materials. He ensured the fire ignited before going back inside the restaurant, according to the press release.
> He also filmed the fire with his cell phone and posted the video on social media
> The fire became so intense that customers in the drive-through lane needed to back out of the parking lot
> Savannah Fire Department worked to put out the fire
He set fire to cardboard that was in dumpster in parking lot. This does not warrant a 5 five jail sentence.
Compare, for example, to hitting a cyclist with a car causing spinal injuries and brain damage and then fleeing the scene. He got charged with a misdemeanor and 90 days jail time which he didn't even serve because it was a suspended sentence.
What's the difference between these two cases where both seem to have wildly disproportionate sentences given the details of the crime? One was a minimum-wage macdonalds employee and the other was an investment banker.
You can't fix Boeing or any other industry with punishments, the flaw is in the financial system of all the west. Some companies suffer more, some less, but their fate will be the same.
A small example: most battery-powered hand tools (drills and co) use 18-21V lithium batteries, with the same connectors for all manufacturers, as a result you can buy some tools from one brand, some from others and swap batteries issueless. We do the very opposite, not only some vendors even insert a small "intelligence" in batteries to impede the use with tools not identify as belonging from the same registered buyer, formally "to avoid stealing" etc. Car parts are the same.
A working industrial system need open standards for interoperability and competition, need a universal school systems where most R&D are public and the private sector pick ideas from them. So marketed ideas are good for users, not for some vendors against their customers. We have had essentially that in the past, when all westerns economies was working well. We have abandoned that to fully go financial. Current state of thing where an entry level BEV from China cost ~9000€ in Thailand and the very ~40.000€ in the EU. We still have some high-tech dominance, but not for long and not without automotive and mid-tech mass industries in general. We can only recover ANNIHILATING private-public partnerships, putting back well funded public research based on research and development goals not short-term profits, stating clear to the private sector: you can loose talents for the public or starting to follow the new-old system.
This should been able to fix in a decade or so, if the WWWIII get postponed. In a shorter timeframe I doubt anything better than the current disaster could be done.
Boeing probably has a lot of politicians in their pockets. And it is one of the largest defense companies. And NASA needs at least two for competition. So I don't think it's going to change much. But I do agree that NASA should reward more contracts to SpaceX until Boeing proves its competence.
In the selection for the commercial crew program they chose Boeing's Starliner as the safe bet and SpaceX's Crew Dragon add the alternative from the newcomer.
In future bids SpaceX can seamlessly take the role of the experienced company with track record, and thanks to SpaceX's success there are plenty of startups bidding to take the role of the innovative alternative.
Boeing's position in defence and aerospace is very safe, but to keep their space division running they will have to let that lobbying shine
You are no longer dependent on the whims of a private company and its shareholders, but bring in the regulatory regime of public service. Also reduce costs as unlike private enterprise, public service need not provide fiscal revenues.
SpaceX isn't publicly traded, it already has no obligation to maximize profits. It is free to follow whichever goals Musk and the SpaceX investors set for the company.
So far those goals mostly involve building cash cows in service of financing even higher goals. I'm not sure if that goal is still Mars, but whatever it is they are reinvesting everything and regularly take in more investments
A company is beholden to its shareholders. That the shareholder wants to make profits and funnel them to some other goal, is the same for non shareholders if they’d hoard that money like a dragon.
If it’s for public benefit, than let the public decide what the benefit be.
I disagree with this line of thought. Spacex took a big risk to get to where they are, just because they happen to have pulled it off and it provides some “public benefit” doesn’t mean it should just be taken from them. And if it’s buy out that still doesn’t solve the problem because people value things completely differently.
This stifles innovation and the willingness to take on risk for a reward down the road. If you actually pull it off and reach some level of “public benefit” it could just be taken from you.
Is Amazons same day delivery of medications a “public benefit”?
SpaceX has reduced costs of launching into space far greater than NASA, an already public service, has achieved. NASA's deeply inefficient costs have directly contributed to its budget being slashed and the disinterest in Congress for funding it further, it is subject to the political whims of being a public service and exacerbated by its uncompetitive spending pattern to achieve anything extraterrestrial.
The direction that the US Government is going is one to incentivize the private sector - yes, with its shareholders and all the trappings of capitalism - but with competition between multiple private enterprises. So far, the space industry is failing to have competition between multiple private enterprises, just because Boeing has poor quality control. But additional entrants into this sector are expected.
I get that there is probably a desire to solely blame Boeing for this - but this seems like as much of a Project Management and integration failure on the NASA side, as it does Boeing putting defective hardware/software into orbit.
It shouldn't have been allowed to happen, period.
I get that what I said will not be popular, but this has been the consensus of every previous thread on this topic that I've seen - NASA is sorta playing the role of a systems integrator here, and assumes the liability for defective components from their subcontractors, and has the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
> Boeing removed the Starliner’s autonomous undocking feature from its software. The aerospace manufacturer wants to push a software update to the spacecraft in orbit, but NASA fears it could do more damage.
I'm very far away from NASA internals, but as I've seen them in the "older" days was that just a _finished_ product went into space and they would not allow to go into space with something they _knew_ required updates in-mission to complete the _original_ mission.
So it seems like a management issue on both sides.
I think its dumb they couldn't have both software profiles available and be able to choose manual or auto, but the original mission did not call for autonomous undocking.
NASA may be taking a different approach, but in civilian aerospace it is prohibited to have code that doesn't run or doesn't trace to a system requirement. I assume that was their rationale for removing it.
This same base capsule design is also supposed to operate autonomously. It previously attempted an autonomous docking. The code was written, it was approved for flight previously. It is not like "autonomous docking" was never a part of the specification for this model of craft; it just wasn't the expected process for this particular mission.
Boeing just didn't bother to make it so the mission could potentially be changed in-flight, they just decided they'll load a software profile on the ground and that missions will just never change.
No, it's really stricter than that in my experience. You verify your software against the requirements. There shall be no deactivated code, even code which as previously flown before is not safe. See the first Ariane 5 launch for a reference. I assume that is why they removed it.
Of course, this isn't to say that Boeing doesn't have much more serious problems going on, they clearly do.
Starliner was already suffering delays at every step. They probably thought they could shave off a couple weeks by only qualifying the parts of the software absolutely needed for the mission and removing everything else
I personally would prefer if NASA handled this internally rather than trotting out an individual to chastise for no benefit to anyone. Accountability on an org? Absolutely. Just don't scapegoat someone when organizational or process incompetence is actually to blame.
Meanwhile, boeing is a publicly traded company with what amounts to a monopoly on many, many, many contracts. What was the point of defeating communism if we just give handouts to non-competitive and highly unproductive organizations who can't even hold themselves accountable? And the people who come out of the woodwork to defend them are even more confusing. Don't you want to avoid burning tax money and calling it progress? If they wanted to be seen as a public good they would have voluntarily given up on profits decades ago instead of trying to come off as parasites.
> NASA is sorta playing the role of a systems integrator here
That used to be the case. For example with the Space Shuttles that is how it went.
With the Commercial Crew Program the idea is that they find commercial providers who take their astronauts where the astronauts has to be when the astronauts has to be there.
One is like building an experimental aircraft from a set of parts. Where they definietly are the system integration. The other is more like paying for airplane tickets.
To quote from the wikipedia page of the program: "The spacecraft are owned and operated by the vendor, and crew transportation is provided to NASA as a commercial service."
> as the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
No. They have the authority to decide if their crew is safe to fly on it or not. But Boeing doesn't need NASA's permission if they just want to fly the Starliner on their own. (As long as they don't fly it with NASA personal, or close to NASA property.)
It is as if you bought a return ticket to fly to some destination and while en-route onwards you heard a death rattle from the engine. Then you have to decide if you trust the company flying you for the return trip, or you find some other way.
nope.. its symmetrical about a bunch of axes. at most they'd need a 60 degree rotation, not 180 like USB-A. So this standard is precisely 3x better than USB-A
I really want to know how a Starliner software update is going to "brick" the ISS Docking Port. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Jalopnik doesn't really seem like an authoritative source on this, especially since the hyperlink they included when they talk about the "Bricking" issue links to some article about simulated decompression sickness that has nothing to do with the ISS docking port...
How could they possibly screw up so badly that a SW update would brick the thing? Did they forget the logic to just reboot to last good/factory FW in case of failure?
This feels like the story they're telling isn't the real story because that's just basic, basic shit that gets beaten on all the time during development.
You're used to consumer software updates that have been tested over literally billions of updates. And they're brilliant - they mostly just work well enough that you don't expect your phone or computer to get bricked during one. But there are rare cases where something goes wrong and they do get bricked. For something like the first ever software update in space, I'd expect the chances of something catastrophic happening would be much higher.
I'm used to writing bootloaders and firmware update systems for heavy equipment with impatient users who do terrible, terrible things to their hardware. Remote software updates fail all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but the things you need to do to come back up 'no worse than when you started' has been known for years.
If you make any sort of device and your updates can brick the device, you suck at what you do.
Not for my users. And there are enough of them out there that if there was some incredibly rare problem that only happened in 1/50000 installs, you would be getting a lot of complaints. Seriously, this is something that can be made bulletproof, if one cares to.
Unless your users are hundreds of kilometers in space and at risk of decompression from something going wrong, then no, your stuff is nowhere near as risky.
A docking system has many, many moving parts under significant stress, and not all of them are tested under the assumption that arbitrary software could drive their positions/torques beyond assumed limits. You can’t factory-reset metal fatigue after it has happened. It’s quite reasonable for NASA to say “this OTA update has to be tested and QA’d to the most rigorous standards.”
My theory, given that this claim makes no sense and the article doesn't cite any sources that say anything like this, that this is just bog standard G/O Media blogspam, with bit of misinformation to increase views.
> Three separate, well-placed sources have confirmed to Ars that the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The reasons why the current software can't perform this operation when it could during ground testing are supposition though, and it seems Jolopnik ran with that a little bit.
are we? I know that word has "shit" in it, and this is a degredation of things, and so we want to use the new word so sound like we're cool and hip to the new lingo the kids are using, but the term, as coined by Cory Doctorow, refers to when a platform ends up in late stage capitalism and goes off extracting value from users at the cost of their experience. Like Facebook. Is that what's going on here, or is it just a more general things are shitty?
> when a platform ends up in late stage capitalism and goes off extracting value from users at the cost of their experience.
That's Boeing's mission statement in general I think, but specifically here I think there's a strong indication that they deployed some software for their stakeholders that they promised would do a thing, then they literally un-deployed it after they got the sign-off.
Doctorow's own definition of enshittification can drift [1][2][3] but I called it that because Boeing sold this system as one thing, but then apprently unilaterally pulled a core feature. In other words they reduced the value of the system _after_ they extracted what they could from it by scoring the contract. It might not reach the exact definition, but it rhymes.
Honestly I thought "enshittification" as something "hip" had already had its time. It just seemed to apply.
[2] https://doctorow.medium.com/the-specific-process-by-which-go... "[T]he ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders"
[3] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
On the ground people need to build a jettison rig that they can install inside the Starliner, launch that rig with SpaceX up to the ISS, install the rig, jettison the Starliner, and finally come home with the SpaceX module. Any other way is certain death and the Russians won't help them.
Wasn't this clarified in the teleconference that it only needs "mission load" upload, some sort of script change rather than software rebuild? The Ars article quoted seem to predate the conference. Isn't this kind of a stale news?
You have to fix it, first you have to quit your job, then astronaut training, then you are shipped to Russia, put on a Soyuz flight to the ISS and fix what you have damaged.
This is just getting worser and worser. Boeing needs to get its shit in place or stop doing moon shots. Imagine if this happens on mars, #BringbackBoeing
too big to fail for airlines/ space companies. It is crazy how this has played out and its just like not even considered in the larger picture of their airplanes falling out of the sky.
This farce felt like it had very generous damage control around it in the press. Hard to view that in a vacuum when you consider the press' dislike of SpaceX because it shares a owner with Twitter and the removal of the Bluecheck privileges.
IMO they're not to big to fail. The gov't could force a breakup into military vs civilian vs space. Yes, this would be a huge win for Airbus and the like but the buck needs to stop somewhere.
You know, like half of star trek is looking for lost crew and ships that have gone astray. People shipping off to mars and beyond are going to have to solve their own problems or just die.
