Boeing... Boeing... Gone!

[SoonerP226]

Why would it not be if involved in electrical work? Maybe they thought being in a space vacuum would negate the heat?

My best guess is an engineer specified something and a purchasing agent changed the spec on the order (I alway watched purchasing agents like a hawk because I once got bitten by one who knew better and eliminated a rather critical requirement I had put in the req). Either that or they sent the intern down to grab the tape and they pulled from the wrong bin.

Lots of things that aren't flammable in Earth's 80% nitrogen atmosphere are super flammable in the 100% oxygen environment of a space capsule.

 

[Snattlerake]

Boeing sold their Wichita campus in 2005 to Onex (Spirit Aerosystems).

 

[SoonerP226]

Also, Boeing does a crapton of business with the .gov. It is absolutely mind blowing at the requirements imposed on .gov contracts on an item of this scale. You don't just build a widget and then go sell it to the .gov. This adds enormous cost and complexity and if you were ever involved you would question why any company would put up with it.

Ben Rich talks a lot about this in his memoir, Skunk Works, about his time working at and running Lockheed's Skunk Works. He said one of Kelly Johnson's cardinal rules was to never, ever refund money to the government. He did that once, when they had sold the military a project based on some preliminary research and gotten funding for it; after the Skunk Works engineers started really digging into it, they discovered that it wasn't going to be feasible, so Johnson returned the unused money to the gov't. The .gov then repaid that integrity by accusing him of trying to bilk the gov't with a program that he knew wouldn't work.

 

[SoonerP226]

Still a huge manufacturing presence in Wichita Ks last week when we were at the end of their runway and the employee parking lots were full in the manufacturing hangers.
This facility is aircraft oriented, but don't have a clue about their space ambitions.
I'm sure they, like all government contractors have lobbies in Washington.

They're not saying that they don't make aerospace products, just that what used to be their core business is now a sideline and their focus is now on getting those sweet gov't dollars.

 

[dennishoddy]

My best guess is an engineer specified something and a purchasing agent changed the spec on the order (I alway watched purchasing agents like a hawk because I once got bitten by one who knew better and eliminated a rather critical requirement I had put in the req). Either that or they sent the intern down to grab the tape and they pulled from the wrong bin.

Lots of things that aren't flammable in Earth's 80% nitrogen atmosphere are super flammable in the 100% oxygen environment of a space capsule.

The disaster in an earlier launch on Appolo 1 where 100% oxygen was the culprit does not apply to current space specs. It's a mix now to prevent that.

I spent two years as a purchasing agent in the same company I worked for in electrical/electronic maintenance before going to the Power Plant to finish out my career.
I was hired as the Maintenance Department buyer because of the knowledge that I could spec out purchases that would be beneficial to the department vs someone that did not have that knowledge from outside.
It ran from buying IC chips to bolts, to machinery parts and so on.
This was the age of solid state electronics where circuit boards could be trouble shot and repaired.
The omission of one letter or number in an IC chip would result in wrong product bought and a delay to get a machine tool back into production.
We had a warehouse for just Maintenace items, that had a price attached to every item just like in a hardware store for accountability and open purchasing so any employee with access could question the price.
One guy would always say I can buy that roll of teflon thread tape at Ace Hardware for 1/2 of what you're buying it for with a big smug on his face in our weekly meetings.
Then I'd have to "splain" to him that his product was 1/3 the thickness, and was not Mil-Spec quality, so it was inferior. I forced them to use the good stuff vs the cheap stuff as a buyer. Hardware from USA vs china and so on.
You would have liked me as a purchasing agent because I'd been there and experienced the idiots that didn't have a clue about what industrial maintenance was all about.
It's not about fixing something to get it running, it's about fixing it to make it reliable and keep running for a long time in a manufacturing environment.
Sadly, the company is no more. It was bought out and now defunct. My wife was one of the last employees after 44 years of employment in the same position. Accountant.

 

[dennishoddy]

Ben Rich talks a lot about this in his memoir, Skunk Works, about his time working at and running Lockheed's Skunk Works. He said one of Kelly Johnson's cardinal rules was to never, ever refund money to the government. He did that once, when they had sold the military a project based on some preliminary research and gotten funding for it; after the Skunk Works engineers started really digging into it, they discovered that it wasn't going to be feasible, so Johnson returned the unused money to the gov't. The .gov then repaid that integrity by accusing him of trying to bilk the gov't with a program that he new wouldn't work.

That's government funding policy in general.
Every department puts in a budget. It never goes down and follows the inflation or worse.
When the money comes in, they have to spend it or it never comes back in the next appropriation bill.
It's insane but that is how government money works.
Example: When I was stationed at Ft Leavenworth Ks, they got several million dollars for roof repair of the main military buildings, not the base housing which needed attention.
Ft Leavenworth is kind of designed like buildings in Italy with red tile roofs that last forever.
They had the money and had to spend it. So, they hired contractors to remove the tiles, contractors to hand brush the red tiles and another contractor to install the tiles back on the roofs of the buildings.
Money spent, and the next allocation will be used for something else wasteful.
Who knows what?

 

[SoonerP226]

The disaster in an earlier launch on Appolo 1 where 100% oxygen was the culprit does not apply to current space specs. It's a mix now to prevent that.

One of the changes in the aftermath of Apollo 1 was to use a mix during testing on the ground, but they still used pure oxygen in flight.

 

[Louro]

That's basically their point. As they put it early in the video, Boeing used to be an aerospace engineering firm in Seattle that became a defense contractor in Chicago and is now a lobbying firm outside DC.

That summarize it.