Three cheers and one cheer more!

Two astronauts aboard the Boeing Starliner, a reusable space capsule design by Boeing Defense, have been temporarily stranded at the International Space Station due to maintenance and reliability problems with their capsule. NASA Mission Control decided to bring the capsule back empty, rather than risk potentially catastrophic failure of the capsule during re-entry, without question the most stressful part of spaceflight, when the capsule must plunge back through the atmosphere in a literal fireball.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts who took the big vertical ride early June 2024, were sentenced to additional months in orbit on the ISS because of the mission failure, though when the Starliner was brought back through the atmosphere, it did touch down in September (uncrewed) successfully. Starliner was a program funded coterminously with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to the tune of $4.2B, while Dragon received $2.6B. According to Wikipedia, Boeing’s project had already exceeded its fixed price contract by $1.6B, indicating a major financial loss for Boeing.

There are all sorts of interesting top-level insights on the Wikipedia page, and I recommend reading it (I hadn’t until I decided to write this piece!) Of particular interest is receptivity to feedback from both the Boeing and the SpaceX engineering teams in the development phase of this project. The various mission failures along the path of Starliner resulted in the termination of Boeing Defense, Space and Security CEO Ted Colbert, who previously had been in charge of Boeing Global Services and CIO of the entire Boeing Company. From reading his resume’, Colbert had been rewarded with recognition that he was both African-American and an engineer multiple times in his career. I’m sure he was happy to play the DEI card in order to move up in Boeing’s chronic Game of Thrones hierarchy, and achieve entry into what many of us call Boeing’s Prince cohort. People at the level of Colbert wield a lot of power and authority. They get their own plane (and I’m not talking a Cessna 172.) I don’t know the exact number of levels in the hierarchy necessary to get to his position, but I’m guessing it is at least seven.

Was he hired because he was a black man? Well, that was probably a consideration. Boeing touts its DEI focus loudly, so I can’t really even understand why that would even be considered in a racist insult. That sword cuts both ways. But it’s just not interesting to me hanging the failure of Starliner all on one dude because he’s black. It really dodges the real blame of what different psychosocial systems produce. What does Conway’s Law really tell us, after all? Rigid psychosocial systems like the Boeing Company, at best, maximize incremental improvement and reliability. And at worst, reward the anti-risk-takers, who then propagate that attitude down the various levels of hierarchy toward a cult of new design mediocrity. Great for maintaining a legacy product line, maybe. Awful for producing anything new.

And Colbert didn’t take over Boeing Defense until 2022 — long after the various problems with Starliner’s problems with its thruster clusters were well-defined, if not understood. Sure — he didn’t fix them. But it’s not clear inside a massive, political rigid hierarchy, that he even could. What CEO, in a multi-stack hierarchical system, even does?

A better way of understanding the problems with Starliner, filled with status-driven infighting at the Boeing Company and its subcontractors, is to look at what SpaceX has done right. The answer is simpler than one might think.

SpaceX is willing to blow rockets up.

Why does this matter? One of the biggest challenges of complexity, that has been covered to death in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, was the lack of what’s called “All Up” testing. All Up testing means putting the whole system on a launchpad, and launching it into space. Doing this recognizes that there is only so much information that can be gathered from reliability testing of components. Why? Components in a large-scale system can only have their respective interactions observed when assembled together and tested. Even then, there’s no hope of constraining complex subassemblies and gathering statistical data for the entire system. You can’t launch a space shuttle 1000 times (or a rocket, for that matter) and gain that kind of confidence. Sooner or later, you have to put it together on a launchpad and Light That Candle.

But rigid hierarchies crave that kind of security. Boeing and NASA have, in the last 40 years, enshrined a no-risk culture that simply is not feasible for pushing the boundaries of spaceflight. The key concept here is what’s know as “configuration control.” What that is is you know all meaningful interactions between the various subsystems before you move forward. And while some level of due diligence in predicting those interactions is certainly part of engineering excellence, the other part of this is realizing you can’t know. And this kind of epistemic humility does not emerge out of experts in rigid silos.

Colbert was not set up as a fall guy for DEI, though he was indeed likely given the position because he had proceeded up the hierarchical stack and had the resume’ for the position. And he was black. But just look at his Wikipedia entry — everything in his career pattern was about exactly what the v-Memes of the contemporary Boeing Company enshrines. And that ain’t risk taking. So metacognition dies, your organization becomes insular, and all your enemies are, of course, on the outside. Because no one on the inside would even bring up a problem before it would happen.

That’s what the death of metacognition looks like.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been busy lining up rockets to blow up, knowing a priori that they would. And because of a young engineering culture, and an expectation that they are creating a learning organization, they’re successfully learning the boundaries of what they don’t know — which is what you need when you cannot a priori assess the limits of configuration control. Knowing what you don’t know enables you to cure your ignorance. And then push the system boundary continuously outward.

There are also some natural consequences of demographics that SpaceX has going for them. I’ve done a couple of projects with them (I’ve also done projects with Boeing) and the main thing that impressed me was how young their engineering staff was. Aside from a couple of my ex-students, I never dealt with anyone older than 30. Combine that with goal-based v-Meme thinking (we just want to solve the immediate problem any way we can) and deep Guiding Principles directions from Elon Musk, the founder (we want humans to be a multi planetary species) and you have a far more potent v-Meme structure than moving up one more click in a massive hierarchy.

Will Starliner ever be a successful competitor to SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule? I personally think that it will take a while, but yes. The v-Meme system at Boeing — a large Legalistic Hierarchy — has the ability to generate the information to cover the information space to make a space capsule. And in large part, their reputation for other lucrative contracts depends on it. But at what cost? We’re going to get some time/money comparisons out of this as far as the efficiency of psychosocial systems in generating and dealing with complexity. Right now, we’re easily at 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of SpaceX But the answer ain’t gonna be pretty for legacy organizational modes.