I really, really hope Boeing doesn't cancel Starliner. Trading a public space monopoly for a private one would be a huge net negative for the country.
The SpaceX leadership has goals that can be opaque and need not align with NASA's. Recently, in the context of X and Tesla, they've bordered on deranged and even anti-American.
If Boeing can get out of the learning phase, even as an imperfect company, it can provide a most valuable service even if its platform is nominally second best.
It is depressing that the only option is to keep throwing money at an sclerotic, extractive, incomponent player. How pro-american has boeing been in the past 20 years really?
Boeing isn't the only possible competitor to Crew Dragon, but even it it were, the ISS is dead in 5 years, so who really cares about a short-term Dragon monopoly. Focus on the future and stop throwing good money after bad with Boeing and over the ancient ISS which is about 85% of the way to incineration.
Well it's the work of the present. Those who survive the present will build the future. Any steady state scenario with one company getting more than 40% of the contracts is fundamentally worse than in-housing at NASA.
I don't think there's a real danger of a true monopoly. There are a number of other options:
1. Orion -- heavier than Dragon so you need a bigger rocket, but it should be able to dock with the space station, and it's already flown uncrewed
2. DreamChaser -- Currently being developed uncrewed, but it was originally supposed to fly with crew, and Sierra says they still want to do a crewed version. It's been moved to Cape Canaveral and is supposed to fly next year.
3. Blue Origin is rumored to be back working on some sort of orbital capsule.
Capitalism doesn't work if you don't let companies that aren't delivering fail. IMO what's probably happened at Boeing's space division is that they're not able to recruit and retain top people anymore given the explosion of new space companies.
Obviously they haven't been moving as fast as SpaceX, but they've delivered New Shepherd and the BE-4 engine, which has flown on the Vulcan and is supposed to fly on New Glenn. The BE-4 is comparable to the Raptor.
> Capitalism doesn't work if you don't let companies that aren't delivering fail.
This argument only works in competitive markets. This market is more or less a natural monopoly due to the massive upfront R&D investment and learning-by-doing requirements. NASA has to constantly wrestle with this 'force' in order to keep it an oligopoly.
If it fails to do so, it should stop the experiment and go back to in-housing everything. Only with an oligopoly (or better) does the American public benefit at all from privatization.
All current problems notwithstanding, SpaceX in 20 years of existence delivered a lot of progress to the aerospace abilities of the whole world. No matter what they'll do next, SpaceX already shown a number of important achievements.
Hope they'll continue.
Also I'm not sure if Boeing's goals are more aligned with NASA's than SpaceX's ones with those of general public - and that public would probably disapprove such things as SLS.
This is the first time ever that we've had competition in the form of multiple companies that can deliver astronauts to orbit.
As for NASA "in-housing" everything, that's always been a continuum. Mercury is probably the last spacecraft that you could really say NASA designed internally that flew. Even operationally, for the last part of the Shuttle program, most all of the operations were done by the United Space Alliance.
That said, I agree that NASA has a role to play to encourage diversity and competition, and IMO they've done that with Orion, Dragon, and DreamChaser. Just because SpaceX could use some competition doesn't mean it has to be Boeing.
Boeing isn't in a learning phase... more of a how much can we underpay our employees and how many cheap subtractors can we get away with phase. Also starliner would not be "nominally" second best, but truly second, or perhaps third best if other options come around(dreamchaser).
Musk may be huffing the right wing nonsense too much, but I don't know if he has actually done anything anti-american(though supporting someone as obviously corrupt as Trump could be considered so I suppose), much of the headlines about him appear to be clickbait nonsense.
SpaceX can't do jack shit without Gov approval, so it wouldn't really matter if they had ulterior motives.
X and Tesla are some of if not the most pro-American values companies in the world. Sorry if freedom of speech offends you but that definitely puts you at odds with the American Founders and myself - an American.
The SpaceX leadership has goals that can be opaque and need not align with NASA's. Recently, in the context of X and Tesla, they've bordered on deranged and even anti-American.
If Boeing can get out of the learning phase, even as an imperfect company, it can provide a most valuable service even if its platform is nominally second best.