Having a piece of mine called “useful” by my old friend Rand Simberg is high praise indeed, but I think he misunderstands one of my main points.
Boeing’s CST 100 is not “better” than the Space X Dragon 2; it is a typical product of a large, publicly held, bureaucratic, government contractor. As such the CST 100 matches precisely the requirements (formal and informal) laid down by NASA and its political masters. The most important of these requirements is that the space taxi should send astronauts to the International Space Station sometime in 2017.
The Dragon 2 has emerged from a relatively small, visionary, tightly held private firm. Space X has so far succeeded, not by following the rules laid out for government suppliers, but by chasing the dream of its founder Elon Musk. If all goes well, the Dragon 2 will lead to a series of spacecraft that will within 20 years or so be zooming their way through the inner solar system. If it still exists, the CST 100 and its successors will be stuck shuttling people between Earth’s surface and Low Earth Orbit.
Boeing is giving the customer what he (or she) wants; Space X is building what Elon wants. I happen to think that Elon’s project is “better” — in the broadest sense — than Boeing’s, but I’m not surprised that the customer, i.e. the politicians and bureaucrats, thought otherwise. So the fact that Space X got any money at all is a small reason for optimism.
I don’t see why Boeing getting its paperwork in on time is a sign of anything other than Boeing being a big company with battalions of lawyers and bureaucrats whose main purpose in life is to make the lawyers and bureaucrats in the U.S. government happy. Augustine’s Law No. 36, adjusted for inflation, still applies: “The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, it would probably be a good thing.”
Boeing has a fiduciary duty to its stockholders. Space X is firmly in the hands of Elon Musk. It’s nice to see that the small new company is shaking up the space industry, but the people who write the checks still respond to the same political and institutional incentives that existed before Space X ever tried to launch its first rocket. I suspect that by the time the politicians fully adjust, New Space and Old Space will have merged. As Orwell put it, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”