Did SpaceX Humiliate Boeing?

The short answer is; no. Boeing and NASA humiliated Boeing. SpaceX is the just mechanism by which it happened.

This is titled this way due to an article I read where a supposed Boeing engineer was ticked off because they (paraphrasing) "had been mocking SpaceX and now they are humiliating Boeing engineers".

I hope this isn't true. I can understand rivalries and poking fun at them sometimes too. But SpaceX is clearly not deserving of any legitimate scorn in this area. They accomplished what their rivals were attempting in less time on a smaller budget.

It is natural for Boeing engineers to be frustrated that someone beat them to their objective. It is natural to be frustrated that a company you considered your rival was that someone. But, now is not the time for feeling humiliated. Now is the time to learn from the results.

I don't know if Starliner is safe to return to Earth with people onboard, but it isn't SpaceX's fault. That lies squarely with Boeing. Even if Starliner is fit to return with passengers.

To be clear, there are only 2 broad reasons for Starliner to return without them:

1. Starliner is fit and Boeing failed to convince NASA
2. Boeing failed to convince NASA because Starliner is legitimately not up to the task

NASA is incentivized to side with Boeing. They were the contractor chosen. They are who NASA sunk all of their money into. They WANT Boeing to succeed. The fact that they aren't going with Boeing shows the degree of failure on Boeing's part.

There would be nothing I would want to talk about here if NASA and Boeing handled this properly.

I am no Elon fan boy, but SpaceX has shown the correct way to deal with failure repeatedly. I remember reading the news after Falcon rockets smashed into the platform and exploded when attempting to land and salvage the thrusters. Musk tweeted in almost real time with absolutely no shame or rejection of the failure. It was embraced 100%. He even theorized why it may have failed and simply acknowledged it as a part of the process.

Can you understand now why SpaceX has leap-frogged Boeing? Imagine being a SpaceX engineer after that launch. The guy who cuts your paychecks has just said "this is normal" to the world, leaving no vacuum for the press to spread FUD.

Contrast that with Boeing and NASA. Statements are few and far between. No one has truly acknowledged that the mission failed and no one has acknowledged this as a normal part of a venture into such a cutting edge field. Boeing engineers are likely afraid for their jobs, when in a better world they shouldn't be. 

Boeing should have stated the obvious up front; the mission failed. They had not planned for the leaks. They could have talked to the robustness of their design and praised their engineers as the design was sufficient to enable the capsule to safely dock with the ISS despite the issues. 

I'd have taken no issue with them wanting a short amount of time with the astronauts onboard to investigate and attempt a fix. But that should have been timeboxed and the possibility of returning via SpaceX or something else should have been publicly accepted immediately. Normalize the fact that things go wrong and we should learn from them.

NASA and Boeing failed in being transparent and forthcoming. This creates stress for the engineers who likely don't know what failure might mean to their job security. This also allows them to focus on things like feeling humiliated rather than taking in the information and iterating on the design. Their company is acting humiliated and that is projected onto their employees.

If Musk has done only one good thing for his employees, it would be how he handles his companies failure publicly. He does a lot more stuff I don't agree with, but I suspect a large part of SpaceX's success is affected by how the companies most public moments are handled by their most visible figurehead.