Boeing is ready to give it another try with the long-delayed crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, scheduled to take off this Saturday at 12:25 p.m. from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Boeing could use a win, as its commercial airplanes division is embroiled in two Senate investigations into repeated safety lapses. But its space division, almost entirely separate from its commercial air cousin, is looking for some good news too: Since Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX were awarded twin contracts for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in 2014, Musk’s company has made eight successful crewed trips to the International Space Station. Boeing has made none. (Boeing could not respond to a request for comment by publication time.) What accounts for the huge discrepancy between these two aerospace titans — starting on equal footing and with roughly equivalent funding from NASA — and what does it mean for humanity’s future in space? “In the space community, you call them ‘old space’ and ‘new space,’” said Todd Harrison, a fellow studying the defense-industrial base and space policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Harrison described the Commercial Crew Program, NASA’s partnership with private companies to develop crewed spacecraft, as “the best case study” for how the space industry has transformed since the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, which ultimately led to the scuttling of its Space Shuttle program. (The Starliner will take NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to and from the International Space Station.) Space, once the premier domain for governments to flex their state capacity and technical superiority, has become another market for the private sector’s would-be “disruptors” to compete in — as observers like Harrison say their flexible, failure-friendly business models allow them to nimbly surpass more bureaucratic legacy organizations like Boeing. (In addition to its rocket and landing programs, SpaceX’s Starlink program has filled the sky with satellites providing internet access.) That’s opened up a new frontier not just for how the nations of the world reach outer space and even other planetary bodies, but what they plan to do when they get there. “The future of the government’s involvement in space is not as the prime contractor who says, ‘Here are my requirements and specifications, build it this way,’” Harrison said. “It's the government buying space capabilities as a service … the government plays a role in investing capital to get you to the point where there is enough information that commercial companies can make a sound investment decision.” That’s already happening, as a direct result of the Commercial Crew Program. SpaceX has built on its experience and expertise to score a contract to land astronauts on the Moon as early as 2026, with its reusable Starship rockets as part of NASA’s Artemis project. A slew of “new space” companies have earned similar contracts, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and the Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which made the first landing on the moon in more than 50 years in February with an unmanned lander. Companies are already staking out their investment opportunities in space, most prominently in the form of Musk’s often-touted hopes for a permanent human habitat on the Moon. That might be more than a sci-fi aspiration: The Moon’s ice, more abundant than previously thought, is a potentially invaluable stepping stone to further space exploration (including Musk’s even more audacious hopes to land humans on Mars.) “If you can melt that ice into water and process it and purify it, you could turn it into propellant that fuels rockets to go other places in the solar system,” Harrison said. “Instead of having to launch all of your propellant from … Earth, you can actually make it in space, and then it's much easier to go places from there.” Smaller space companies are already exploring the possibilities for resource extraction and even manufacturing in space — but that future is a long way off, and there’s plenty of basic research and exploration that needs to happen before space becomes another industrial center. Harrison argued that no matter what happens, the difference between Boeing and SpaceX’s philosophies will likely shape the future of space exploration more than any one company’s ability to deliver on its contract. “Boeing has continued to use its legacy engineering mindset, which is about quality and trying to get everything exactly right the first time, while the SpaceX model is ‘Let's just go try it and see what works,’” Harrison said. “The problem is that the technology is getting so complex, so sophisticated, and so tightly coupled … it can affect the outcome in ways the legacy mindset of modeling and analysis just doesn't find, while real-world testing will figure it out for you.”
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