SpaceX is the only organization in the industry that prioritizes speed. For the regulators and the other players, they are all pretty happy to do things at their own pace and speed.

But the regulators have certified SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

Sure. But they are waiting on contracts to do anything.

Yes, that is how Commercial Crew works. They get paid to send people to the ISS

By "other players" do you mean the incumbents? Parties with existing revenue streams and contracts stretching out years without any performance requirements?

Anybody who is guaranteed a job with a decent salary for life and a great retirement plan is not incentivized to perform except by some personal drive. Anybody who wants onto the gravy train is motivated to do whatever work it takes to get a seat at that table. And they are motivated to do it as fast as possible.

It is not wrong to prioritize safety over speed. But you can use the safety excuse to drag things out for as long as people are willing to pay you without producing results. While space travel risks involve the obvious threat to human life, those risks can be generalized like any other risk. Usually, the lower the risk, the lower the reward. Unless there is something interfering. Interference that manipulates the risk/reward ratio often has the smell of corruption in the minds of many people.

Those were largely delays in funding (4.5 years) not just the actual program. “In July 2010, Boeing stated that the capsule could be operational as early as 2015 with sufficient near-term approvals and funding.”

“On September 16, 2014, NASA chose Boeing (Starliner) and SpaceX (Crew Dragon) as the two companies to be funded to develop systems to transport U.S. government crews to and from the International Space Station.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner

Scroll down to the "testing" bit.

The pad abort test resulted in a parachute not working - they forgot a pin. https://spacenews.com/missing-pin-blamed-for-boeing-pad-abor...

The first orbital test failed to reach the ISS because it accidentally burned too much propellant. A second error nearly made it burn up on reentry and had to be fixed in orbit.

The second orbital test failed to launch because the craft's valves couldn't handle humidity (despite being designed to launch from Florida). When it finally went (after a complete rebuild of those valves), multiple thrusters from two different systems failed in orbit.

The third orbital test - the first crewed - has been now indefinitely delayed.

It is well behind schedule.

You’re skipping over the bit where “After analysis and corrective actions it was launched on May 19, 2022, and completed a successful mission to the ISS, clearing the way for the crewed flight test.”

They had an initial failure, and 1 delayed but successful mission. The 3rd mission is again delayed, that’s fairly normal for manned spacecraft. Rocket science is hard, news at 11…

The second mission had to be added due to the first's failures. (https://spacenews.com/boeing-to-fly-second-starliner-uncrewe...) It wasn't originally in the schedule. (SpaceX, by comparison, flew crew on their second test flight.)

And again, Starliner's third attempt is now indefinitely delayed for a rebuild of critical systems.

"largely delays in funding not just the actual program" is simply not the truth.

SpaceX’s dragon had test failures slow things doing remember this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scz-fFZT-dI

> is simply not the truth.

Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays, just using their initial announcement date let alone when funding was actually provided. That’s just simple math.

> SpaceX’s dragon had test failures

There's a major difference between internal tests intended to discover problems and "we think everything's good, NASA, can we send it to the ISS?" tests intended to show everything's working.

> Funding represents significantly more than 4 years of delays

Sure. Add on additional years worth of failed tests on the actual production vehicle and you get the $1.1B in the article. Boe-OFT was now nearly four years ago.

They were only different in how expensive they were to conduct. NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing all expected these tests to have a significant risks, which is why they where unmanned.

The entire point of spending that much money was to discover problems. As to your “sure” if admit Boeings delays are less than half of total delays, that sounds like you agree with me.

Anyway, Dragon 2 as an iteration of an existing platform was by far the lower risk option. But, that’s a completely separate question.

Dragon 2 is _not_ an iteration on Dragon 1. It’s a completely different vehicle and it was risky for SpaceX to go the route of developing a completely new vehicle. Yet they got it done, cheaper and faster.

You can make that argument, but they share quite a bit of hardware and software.

Plenty of things were updated like IDSS, but that’s an evolution of the old docking standard etc etc. But in the end the unmanned dragon 2 is using the same Falcon 9 rocket, on literally the same mission they even call it extended dragon in several places.

Yes, the Commercial Crew funding was spread out over more years than NASA wanted due to insufficient budget from Congress, which delayed both SpaceX and Boeing. But Boeing has had 3 more years of delays on top of that due to bad engineering.