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.