[ijustlovemath]

COVID was a single DARPA grant cycle in length. These companies move at glacial paces compared to the SaaS plays that the typical HN dev is familiar with. I'm guessing COVID never really threatened big programs like Starliner.

[somenameforme]

Your guess would be incorrect. Boeing felt they were in risk of collapse during COVID and immediately went to the government asking for a $60 billion bailout. The government wanted equity in exchange for this bailout, which Boeing didn't want to offer. So they ended up offering Federal Reserve facilitated 'Boeing bonds', and took in about $25 billion to stay afloat. [1] Amusingly a big part of the reason they ended up in such catastrophic danger is that they'd been dumping all their cash reserves into buying their own stock, to try to bring its flagging price up. [2]

[1] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/05/04/how-boeing-was-res...

[2] - https://archive.is/eO3FJ (WaPo archive)