>>14330208That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying things anon. Appreciate it.
>>14330214SpaceX's success and Boeing's failure changed the narrative of cost-plus contracting permanently. SpaceX was bound to a milestone based approach, which the company delivered on time, at budget, and with overabundant capability. Compare that to Starliner, which has gotten magnitude order more in funding than SpaceX (even though it wasn't known to them at the time that they could bid more and would have still likely won the contract), and every single flight has been a failure and/or every single capsule they've made, has catastrophically failed in some capacity. Worse, they only made a total of 3 capsules and only planned to make a total of 3 capsules. Lastly, and most importantly, Starliner's flight is directly integrated to a rocket that is reliant on Russian rocket engines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V | a pair of RD-180s is what make up the thrust system of the core stage. In theory, Vulcan Centaur could be used to launch future Starliner flights, but Vulcan Centaur's launch manifest is basically fully booked and said rocket will not fly unless Blue Origin delivers on its engines to ULA; which remains entirely in suspect at this point. In addition to all of that, when SpaceX bid for HLS, they proposed the Starship architecture and after having won it, have consistently knocked it out of the park with every single milestone laid out in the current contract format. The fact that on the most recent keynote from NASA, Nelson went on record to state that he's reviewed SpaceX's progress with line item obligations and finds the output to be quite good, says a lot for someone who's infamously known to be a champion of old space. Granted, he still is with SLS, but just goes to show where NASA as a whole is going. As such, NASA has shifted into a milestone based system. Where maximizing success via a results driven delivery for funding standard is key to Moon and beyond.
