NASA freezes Starliner missions

Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now.

For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.

They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.

> Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now

No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.

It is unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX.

> unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX

Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.

Starliner works. It had a minor issue that turned out not to be so serious. It just happens to obscenely expensive.

There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done.

Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

The shuttle worked. It had many successful flights.

Then it killed 7 astronauts.

Then it worked again they said.

Then 7 more died.

> Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

Well that's just a straight up lie.

>> Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

> Well that's just a straight up lie.

I'm guessing they're confusing the expected, catastrophic explosive "failures" on experimental Starship prototypes with payload-carrying F9/FH flights.

Yes, when you redefine failure to mean success, everything can be a success.

That kid who got 1% on his test? He passed, if you redefine the threshold for passing to mean something that everyone else would consider a failure.

Launching a prototype rocket with the expectation that it will probably blow up and then having it blow up isn't a failure, especially when the goal is to see what happens.