Quote:
Originally Posted by seamonster
From the outside it just looks like they had a reading that wasn't nominal and the engineers scrubbed the mission. That's not a "failure" that's somebody doing their job. And if I'm tasked with flying out on one of these things that's what I'd want to see. Musk may or may not have allowed that. Musk is in love with himself and his public image and if I'm a hard nosed NASA astronaut that scares me more than a buzzing oxygen valve. And you also have to look at the culture that SpaceX comes out of. Tesla is heavily subsidized by the government and they're allowed to ship out an auto-pilot feature that caused 700+ crashes and plenty of death and destruction. Boeing aviation had TWO crashes and ate shit, had public hearings and lost considerable stock value. Which side is going to be more likely to listen to engineers and which would go "agile" and tolerate risk? It's probably going to be the side that gets cute with industry terms like "rapid unplanned disassembly".
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Musk doesn't get to personally decide if a mission scrubs or not, and SpaceX has scrubbed plenty of launches. In fact, SpaceX just scrubbed a hotfire yesterday.
Also, Boeing Starliner failed its first launch because the clock in the control program was wrong, causing the engines to fire early and use up their fuel too quickly, meaning that it could not reach its intended orbit. How the control program was allowed to go to launch without being fully tested is beyond me.
If I had to choose a program to put me into space, I'd pick the one with the proven successful program.