Space

the first astronauts warned us about a private space industry. Sure, they can innovate faster and cheaper, but not as safely.

Crew Dragon: 0

Space Shuttle: 14

I don't buy that at all. If you read about Apollo, and before that, you'll see that simply this stuff is hard and many times you have things "half-assed" and just take the risk. Another case is the Space Shuttle..

With that said I think Boeing has been too unreliable for manned space flight. I don't trust much the "we're just taking time to gather more data" and this to me is the bad part about private companies: they have no compulsion to be truthful to the public.

It is not the first time that Boeing did something space-related for the military or NASA. The big difference is that while on earlier contracts they just asked for more money time and again, this time they are on a fixed budget and have to show results before getting paid.

And they cannot claim it was not enough money to get people up and down safely. From the same pot, SpaceX got about half as much as Boeing got. Boeing cried foul about this "wasting" money on an unexperienced upstart! And now look where both companies are with their project: SpaceX is happily going up and down like an elevator, and Boeing, with twice the money and years of delay, launched people into space with a known-defekt spaceship.

I in no way want to diminish the achievements of the original astronauts but that doesn't mean they're always right. SpaceX has shown that it can work.

I suspect SpaceX benefited from the closer scrutiny they received from NASA and regulatory agencies, especially after Musk smoked pot on Joe Rogan‘s podcast. I’m sure he would’ve liked to “innovate” more by cutting corners but wasn’t able to because of the scrutiny, so they had to do a better job of dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. In contrast Boeing has spent several decades trying to convince the government they don’t need close scrutiny because they know what they’re doing. As the builder of some of the 20th century’s best-regarded aircraft and spacecraft, they’d largely been given that lax oversight by the 2010s. We now see the legacy of this, as lax oversight allowed them to cut the corners everyone assumed SpaceX wanted to cut, with hundreds of people dead as a result.

When the Commercial Crew Program was first announced everyone assumed Boeing would easily ace the project and SpaceX would struggle, maybe even fail. Now I’m just hoping we don’t see two more dead courtesy Boeing before the year’s end.