Well Starliner was originally contracted to be certified in 2017. So a few month slip on top of the 5+ year slip already maybe justifies some of the skepticism from ARS
Would be nice to see some of that skepticism applied to Crew-1, when it slipped 4 years, but Ars treated SpaceX announcements as gospel truth.
Hell, the launch article for Crew-1 (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-t...) literally did not once mention that that launch was delayed, let alone 3 separate year+ delays. Just about SpaceX "saving" NASA from "wandering around in the wilderness with no access to space".
Except Crew-1 Happened in 2020, Staliner-1 has been delayed until probably late 2023, 2024. Demo-1 Happened before OFT-1. They both started at similar times and also their delayed missions were delayed by similar amounts initially. By all accounts, Starliner is behind is every possible way with much greater funding than SpaceX.
SpaceX is at Crew 7, Starliner isn't even close to Starliner-1
> By all accounts, Starliner is behind is every possible way with much greater funding than SpaceX.
That's only true if you assume SpaceX strictly allocated budgets per program and that no revenue from their other missions have gone to the crewed flight programs.
I'm not saying Spaceliner is a success, or that there are arguments to be made about each company's approach (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
None of that removes the fairly evident bias that Ars can be counted on to spin anything SpaceX in a positive manner (a la ignoring years of delays to talk of SpaceX saving the day for NASA, while a refusal to commit to a launch date following a just discovered issue for Boeing immediately implies more years of delays).
Sure its startup SpaceX that has massive amount of money from other programs that the can smash into Dragon. Its not like the were not also working on 5 other development projects at the time.
It Eric Berger, not "Ars". And he absolutly did report on all the SpaceX delays. After the testing explosion he even said SpaceX might be behind. Stop spreading your conspircy threory nonsense.
So disingenuous. SpaceX’s “craters”, whatever that means, are not from mission failures but from working on booster landing and reusability, _after_ successfully delivering their mission payloads.
SpaceX landings require reserve fuel and thus much lower cargo capacity to attempt, and failure to land cost millions in equipment when it doesn’t work. So, cost wise it’s little different than failing to send up an additional satellite.
Partial mission success gets them a paycheck, but it would be interesting to look at their financials and see if they lost money on those missions.
> (you could argue that while Boeing's approach seems relatively glacial, Boeing also has far fewer smoking craters and damaged barges than SpaceX).
Yet SpaceX is still cheaper despite those damaged barges and craters. And that's really all there is to those, a cost element. It would be different if they had left smoking corpses but they haven't.
So does, "Announced in 2012 to be launched in November 2016, the program suffered numerous delays until four years after the initial launch date, it's taking off..."
> and the situation in Russia
Presumably you mean the Ukraine invasion, which had zero bearing on this, given that it happened nearly a year and a half later...
I mean I guess you are correct it was late but it was still first relative to Boeing. So the timeline warranted less emphasis then say now when Boeing is delayed 3 plus years on top of that.
I’m not sure how you can say the Ukraine invasion has zero bearing on the “NASA…having no access to space”. Given starliner is a dumpster fire and NASA would not be able to reliably count on Soyuz for access to ISS, it was a remarkably prescient statement. Even if Russia hadn’t invaded in 2020 it was obvious that NASA having its own capability to get to ISS was a strategic priority, that was only achieved by SpaceX.
Hell, the launch article for Crew-1 (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-t...) literally did not once mention that that launch was delayed, let alone 3 separate year+ delays. Just about SpaceX "saving" NASA from "wandering around in the wilderness with no access to space".