Spacex’s success in space puts Boeing Starliner to literal shame .
A decade plus ago, spaceX stood no chance against Boeing, the venerable behemoth at the forefront of the aerospace industry. Now fast forward to 2020, Boeing is struggling immensely with the Starliner aircraft .But against all odds, SpaceX became the first privately held company to be awarded a contract to send humans to orbit, putting the once untouchable Boeing to shame.
Years of hard work and toil later, SpaceX won the NASA contract to send astronauts to the International Space Station last year in 2020, beating Boeing.
When the contracts for the Commercial Crew Program were awarded in 2014, Boeing received the lion’s share, slightly more than 60 percent of the $6.8 billion NASA awarded, getting $4.2 billion compared to the $2.6 billion SpaceX received for the same amount of work.
Boeing is struggling with the Starliner aircraft NASA contracted it to build while SpaceX continues to record success after success.
The Starliner journey began for Boeing when it got one of a pair of contracts from NASA in 2010.
The Boeing CST-100 Starliner is a class of two reusable crew capsules expected to transport crew to the International Space Station (ISS).
After several rounds of competitive development contracts within the Commercial Crew Program starting in 2010, NASA selected the Boeing Starliner, along with SpaceX Crew Dragon, for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) program, with an award of US$4.2 billion in 2014 and this as you very well know, Boeing lost.
In late 2019 the uncrewed Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight Test (Boe-OFT) launched with the Atlas V N22 and reached orbit but was not completely successful.
Starliner includes one space tourist seat, and the Boeing contract with NASA allows Boeing to price and sell passage to low Earth orbit on that seat.
From that moment onward Boeing could not avoid the progress of its Starliner being compared with what SpaceX is achieving with its Crew Dragon and now Starship.
However, it turned out to be a huge failure as the Starliner did not reach the ISS due to a timing glitch to cause it to burn fuel prematurely instead the capsule returned to Earth in a shortened test flight in the post-flight analysis by Boeing and NASA the team discovered over 80 corrective actions that Boeing had to take.
It took Boeing more than a year to fix all the corrections including the ones it discovered on its own and get the Starliner ready for another flight test although it would use a new spacecraft.
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