[pbae]

What's the worst-case scenario they're trying to avoid from being 100% dependent on SpaceX? Perhaps it's something like the present scenario. If the vaccine is as bad as the disease, then skip the vaccine and just chance it.

[doctorpangloss]

Huh? Isn't the right interpretation that they are 100% dependent on SpaceX right now, in the present scenario, but simply pretending otherwise? The facts are what they are.

The reason one spaceship is better than another isn't a management or strategy problem. It is what it is. There's no decision here that changes whether or not Starliner is a shitty spaceship. It might look like it does.

Is NASA management is personally going to be assembling and running the plans? One interpretation is that they will now (?). Another is that is already happening and they are sucking at it, and that is SpaceX's opportunity in a nutshell.

If the government wants better spaceships, it has to occasionally buy them in politically unideal circumstances. It is that simple. Sometimes it will take longer to turn some senator's state into a manufacturing powerhouse than we will have political appetite to sustain all the failures on that journey. The fact that it's not an economic problem, that no amount of money can turn around Boeing, is bad, and that's why I am surprised. Any honest interpretation of the facts makes NASA, a bunch of civil service people, look like they are delaying the inevitable to benefit no one.