2. The Airbus A380
In 1988 (yes, that's 22 years ago), a group of Airbus executives decided to challenge the Boeing 747's 18-year reign as the super-heavyweight-freight-plane champion. They suggested building a plane so big that it would be to the 747 what the 747 was to pretty much every other plane: its uncle.
After quite a few years of additional research, Airbus engineers projected this gigantic plane could be up to 20% cheaper to operate than the rival 747, and the Airbus bigwigs were overjoyed. A 20% improvement in efficiency sounds pretty good, but keep in mind that by then, it had been almost thirty years since the introduction of the 747. Naturally, no one bothered to point out that a 20% improvement in three decades is actually pretty dismal, nor that there was still no good reason why the new plane had to be the size of a supertanker, so the Airbus executives, fueled by the size of their wallets and, presumably, the lack of size of some of their other appendages, green-lighted the A380 "Let's Get Into A Childish Size Fight With Boeing" project.
Airbus's competitive business strategy: physically block Boeings from getting onto the runway.
But Airbus forgot one key rule of international competition - do not get into size fight with America. Because whether we're building cars, planes, or hamburgers, our first instinct is to make it big. We are damn good at making things big, and we will find every reason to make things big. But when we decide that it's time to move on to smaller and better things, then you can be damn sure we've exhausted every possible reason to keep making things bigger.
As Airbus was off frolicking in Brobdingnag, Boeing sat down in 2003 and realized that with skyrocketing fuel prices and plummeting customer demand, smaller and more fuel-efficient planes would be a lot more attractive to the airline industry. It would be much easier to fill up such a plane with passengers, and much cheaper to fill it up with gas. While Airbus found itself running into lengthy delays, mostly due to unforeseen complications of the A380's size (e.g. they ran out of copper wire at one point), Boeing started and completed developing the 787 Dreamliner.
Airbus delivered its first A380 to Singapore Airlines in 2007, and Boeing is wrapping up final flight testing for the 787. There are already 866 standing orders for the 787.
Total orders for the A380? 202.
Pardon me, it seems like I'm suffering from a momentary bout of amnesia. Who's your daddy again?
Okay sure, A380s are more expensive, at about $300 mil a pop versus $150 mil per Dreamliner. Even so, Airbus has made less than half as much on the A380 as Boeing has on the 787, even with a three-year head start. The A380 was an overwhelming undertaking with underwhelming results, and frankly, I'm not looking forward to traveling in that flying sardines can any time soon.
So much for making Boeing your nephew, Airbus.
1. The International Space Station
The International Space Station was born out of a semi-noble idea - to maintain a semi-permanent human presence in space. It was hoped to be an unprecedented collaboration between the most influential nations and continents of the globe - America, Russia, Europe, Japan, and, even though we all know it's really just a part of America, Canada. It would serve as a testbed for microgravity experiments and train astronauts for extended missions in space.
The ISS, still in its last phase of construction, has indeed, for the most part, accomplished what it was intended to do. Dozens of research articles are published every month with data collected on board the ISS, and astronauts have learned tons of new ways to prevent their muscles from dying in space. But at what price?
The total cost of the project, according to the European Space Agency, is around 100 billion euros, or about 140 billion US dollars. More than ten times the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program, which brought twelve men to another celestial body. More than twenty times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider, which explodes light to make black holes. And what exactly does the ISS do again? Well, float.
A portion of the International Space Station. I have no idea what that is, but it probably cost your country an A380.
I love space exploration, but I just don't see how the ISS is doing any exploring by hanging around Earth. It's like if Christopher Columbus decided to explore the world by sailing around England a hundred times. I want manned missions to Mars, rovers to Io, another Voyager craft shooting towards the Oort cloud. All of those combined would probably still be cheaper than the ISS, and we wouldn't have to worry about keeping anything from falling down onto our heads.
The International Space Station tops this list not because it was a failure, but simply because 140 billion dollars is such an overwhelming price tag that anything short of cold fusion or world peace is going to suck. And $140 billion for a metal thing that floats? That deserves to be the Most Underwhelming Invention of the 2000s.
In 1988 (yes, that's 22 years ago), a group of Airbus executives decided to challenge the Boeing 747's 18-year reign as the super-heavyweight-freight-plane champion. They suggested building a plane so big that it would be to the 747 what the 747 was to pretty much every other plane: its uncle.
After quite a few years of additional research, Airbus engineers projected this gigantic plane could be up to 20% cheaper to operate than the rival 747, and the Airbus bigwigs were overjoyed. A 20% improvement in efficiency sounds pretty good, but keep in mind that by then, it had been almost thirty years since the introduction of the 747. Naturally, no one bothered to point out that a 20% improvement in three decades is actually pretty dismal, nor that there was still no good reason why the new plane had to be the size of a supertanker, so the Airbus executives, fueled by the size of their wallets and, presumably, the lack of size of some of their other appendages, green-lighted the A380 "Let's Get Into A Childish Size Fight With Boeing" project.
Airbus's competitive business strategy: physically block Boeings from getting onto the runway.
But Airbus forgot one key rule of international competition - do not get into size fight with America. Because whether we're building cars, planes, or hamburgers, our first instinct is to make it big. We are damn good at making things big, and we will find every reason to make things big. But when we decide that it's time to move on to smaller and better things, then you can be damn sure we've exhausted every possible reason to keep making things bigger.
As Airbus was off frolicking in Brobdingnag, Boeing sat down in 2003 and realized that with skyrocketing fuel prices and plummeting customer demand, smaller and more fuel-efficient planes would be a lot more attractive to the airline industry. It would be much easier to fill up such a plane with passengers, and much cheaper to fill it up with gas. While Airbus found itself running into lengthy delays, mostly due to unforeseen complications of the A380's size (e.g. they ran out of copper wire at one point), Boeing started and completed developing the 787 Dreamliner.
Airbus delivered its first A380 to Singapore Airlines in 2007, and Boeing is wrapping up final flight testing for the 787. There are already 866 standing orders for the 787.
Total orders for the A380? 202.
Pardon me, it seems like I'm suffering from a momentary bout of amnesia. Who's your daddy again?
Okay sure, A380s are more expensive, at about $300 mil a pop versus $150 mil per Dreamliner. Even so, Airbus has made less than half as much on the A380 as Boeing has on the 787, even with a three-year head start. The A380 was an overwhelming undertaking with underwhelming results, and frankly, I'm not looking forward to traveling in that flying sardines can any time soon.
So much for making Boeing your nephew, Airbus.
1. The International Space Station
The International Space Station was born out of a semi-noble idea - to maintain a semi-permanent human presence in space. It was hoped to be an unprecedented collaboration between the most influential nations and continents of the globe - America, Russia, Europe, Japan, and, even though we all know it's really just a part of America, Canada. It would serve as a testbed for microgravity experiments and train astronauts for extended missions in space.
The ISS, still in its last phase of construction, has indeed, for the most part, accomplished what it was intended to do. Dozens of research articles are published every month with data collected on board the ISS, and astronauts have learned tons of new ways to prevent their muscles from dying in space. But at what price?
The total cost of the project, according to the European Space Agency, is around 100 billion euros, or about 140 billion US dollars. More than ten times the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program, which brought twelve men to another celestial body. More than twenty times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider, which explodes light to make black holes. And what exactly does the ISS do again? Well, float.
A portion of the International Space Station. I have no idea what that is, but it probably cost your country an A380.
I love space exploration, but I just don't see how the ISS is doing any exploring by hanging around Earth. It's like if Christopher Columbus decided to explore the world by sailing around England a hundred times. I want manned missions to Mars, rovers to Io, another Voyager craft shooting towards the Oort cloud. All of those combined would probably still be cheaper than the ISS, and we wouldn't have to worry about keeping anything from falling down onto our heads.
The International Space Station tops this list not because it was a failure, but simply because 140 billion dollars is such an overwhelming price tag that anything short of cold fusion or world peace is going to suck. And $140 billion for a metal thing that floats? That deserves to be the Most Underwhelming Invention of the 2000s.
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