If someone had told NASA a decade ago that SpaceX would build a new ride for astronauts to get to the International Space Station before Boeing, the space agency might have laughed that person out of the room.
NASA contracted both companies in 2014 to make spaceships. SpaceX, considered a startup at the time, not only got its passenger spaceship to the finish line first, it has carried 50 people to orbit, while Boeing has continued toiling with Starliner, the company’s competing project that has yet to reach certification. Since SpaceX’s Crew Dragon went into service in 2020, Boeing has played a veritable game of Whac-A-Mole trying to address one engineering problem after another, most recently flammable interior tape and parachute lines that didn’t meet safety standards.
Why the legacy company has struggled with the spacecraft and suffered delays isn’t all that clear. Answers from Boeing leaders have been at times stunningly opaque.
“There’s a number of things that were surprises along the way that we had to overcome, so I can’t pick out any one that I would point to,” said Mark Nappi, the company’s program manager for Starliner. “This is a typical design and development type of program, and we’ve done a good job of getting us to this point.”
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