Ten years ago, NASA nearly chose a single spacecraft provider, a decision that would have left SpaceX out of the picture, and set the stage for a disastrously limited future.
It’s hard to imagine a more stressful version of the Boeing Starliner saga, but an insider’s look into a fateful meeting that took place 10 years ago reveals that things could have been much worse.
Considering how things turned out, choosing Boeing as its sole commercial partner would’ve been an incredibly bad move by NASA. At the time, however, Boeing was the more reliable choice while the Elon Musk-led SpaceX was a flashy newcomer that hadn’t had a chance to prove itself yet. Officials at NASA leaned more towards Boeing, and almost allocated the space agency’s entire Commercial Crew budget to the company while leaving SpaceX out.
“We really did not have the budget for two companies at the time,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s head of the Commercial Crew program, told Berger. “No one thought we were going to award two. I would always say, ‘One or more,’ and people would roll their eyes at me.” In the end, Boeing’s refusal to perform an in-flight test of Starliner’s abort system—thrusters designed to propel the vehicle away if the rocket malfunctions during launch—became a critical factor. Boeing was only willing to conduct a test of the abort system on the ground, which prompted NASA’s head of safety and mission assurance to deem the company’s bid as unsatisfactory.
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