Absurdity
SpaceX Gets Third Straight NASA Crew Contract While Boeing's Astronaut Taxi Sits In Therapy
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
NASA announced this week that SpaceX will operate the next three crewed missions to the International Space Station under contracts covering Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17, a deal worth more than one billion dollars and representing the clearest possible official position on which rocket company NASA trusts to return its people to Earth in the same vehicle they left in.
Boeing's Starliner capsule, for context, completed its first crewed test flight last year by dropping off two astronauts and then coming home alone. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts in question, waited on the station for over nine months before SpaceX came and got them. Boeing later explained that this was a successful demonstration of the spacecraft's capabilities, which is one way to describe it.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters that the agency remains 'committed to commercial crew competition' and 'values having multiple providers,' which is the institutional version of telling your ex you still believe in them while moving your stuff out in a U-Haul.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who inherited Starliner along with a separate set of structural problems on a completely different flying vehicle, said in a recent earnings call that the company is 'evaluating the path forward for the program.' He added that Boeing remains 'deeply committed to human spaceflight,' a commitment the company has expressed consistently in press releases while expressing something more complicated in actual spacecraft.
The three new SpaceX contracts extend the company's role as NASA's primary astronaut ferry service through at least 2030, at which point NASA has agreed to evaluate whether it would like to continue paying SpaceX or whether some other option has materialized. Industry analysts describe the probability of another option materializing as 'Boeing-dependent,' which they say with a particular facial expression.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon has now completed fourteen crewed missions without leaving anyone behind, a streak that the company has declined to publicize in any Boeing-specific marketing because they do not need to. The spacecraft lands in the ocean, which sounds bad on paper but has so far proven superior to the alternative, which is landing in New Mexico and then discovering a helium leak.
Starliner currently sits at Boeing's facility in Kennedy Space Center. It has not been formally canceled. It has not been formally scheduled for another flight. A Boeing spokesperson described the capsule as 'in an active evaluation phase,' which is the corporate equivalent of a gym membership that still shows up on the credit card statement.
Wilmore and Williams, who spent 286 days on the space station waiting for a ride, have both returned to active duty and declined to say anything on record that would embarrass Boeing. This is either an act of extraordinary professional grace or evidence that NASA's astronaut screening process filters very specifically for people who will not cause a scene.
NASA, for its part, says it hopes Starliner eventually returns to service so the agency has two providers again. It is a generous thing to say about a capsule that left two people in low Earth orbit and drove home.
Boeing's stock has not recovered. SpaceX is not publicly traded, but if it were, analysts say it would have recovered.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/21/nasa-gives-spacex-a-billion-reasons-to-keep-flying-crew-dragon/5297705