[FireBeyond]

> 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).

[panick21_]

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.

[elteto]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[wkat4242]

> (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.

They do really do something right.