Quote:
Originally Posted by ThrobProng
Hopefully NASA will avoid Boeing like the plague going forward.
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The issue is that, despite all of Boeing's issues, NASA still REALLY wants to have redundancy. SpaceX had an issue with their second stage on a Starlink launch a month or so ago, and those kinds of issues usually ground the entire fleet until they figure out what happened.
Thankfully, that issue was really obvious, so it only took a couple of weeks to get them flying again, but it's not out of the question an incident could ground SpaceX for months.
NASA doesn't want to have to rely on the Russians to get people to/from ISS, so they would really prefer to have two options for U.S.-based rides. That means continuing to work to get Boeing certified even as frustrating as the process has been.