Elon Musk calls Boeing’s first crewed space flight historic, saying SpaceX beat them to the punch years ago

• Elon Musk criticized Boeing for X before its first astronaut flight to space.

• SpaceX beat Boeing to the punch, flying NASA astronauts to the space station four years ago for less.

• Musk said Boeing has “too many non-technical managers”.

Elon Musk celebrated the day of Boeing’s first astronaut flight into space by criticizing the company on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The Starliner spacecraft, built by Boeing in collaboration with NASA, is set to launch into space on Monday evening, carrying astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station.

But SpaceX surpassed them in 2020 when it became the first private company to fly astronauts into space and ended a nine-year hiatus in US human spaceflight.

Musk was sure to point this out in X’s post on Monday, saying “SpaceX finished 4 years early.” Boeing did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that achieved the feat came from the same NASA initiative that will fly Starliner on Monday. The effort, known as the Commercial Crew Program, gave Boeing $4.2 billion to design, build and test its spacecraft.

Not only did SpaceX do it faster—its spacecraft were also cheaper, costing NASA $2.6 billion. Since the first crewed flight in 2020, seven astronaut crews have flown to and from the ISS for NASA, and an eighth is currently on the station. He also flew four private missions.

With every flight, SpaceX is making money, and Boeing is pouring more money into Starliner.

Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, pointed out the difference on X Monday morning. He blamed it on “too many non-technical managers at Boeing”.

Musk was reposting an Ars Technica article by the publication’s senior space editor Eric Berger, which detailed how “Boeing decisively lost the commercial crewed space race, and it was a very expensive business.”

There were obvious technical reasons for the delay. During Starliner’s first attempt to fly to the ISS unmanned, software errors forced it to return to Earth early. Then a series of issues, including malfunctioning valves in the drive system, caused further delays.

But commentators like Musk and Berger say there’s an underlying reason.

The Commercial Crew Program represents a major shift in how NASA views its contractors. Moving forward, from space stations to the moon to Mars, NASA is trying to foster a new competitive economy in space. Rather than the entity that runs everything, the agency wants to be one of many customers on space stations, spacecraft and companies’ moon bases.

That’s part of why Crew Dragon and Starliner were on fixed-price contracts. NASA set the price, and then SpaceX and Boeing had to build and fly the spacecraft to NASA’s specifications.

After all, the companies would have other customers on their spacecraft. They were only being built for the government. So the ballooning costs will be on them.

That’s an adjustment for Boeing as a legacy contractor for the Department of Defense and NASA, aerospace expert George Nield previously told Business Insider.

Boeing was used to the government paying all its costs to provide the best product. Under that model, Berger explained, “cost overruns and delays weren’t the company’s problem—they were NASA.”

Suddenly, with a fixed price, “it’s up to the company to figure out what risks to take in terms of new technologies and new approaches,” said Nield, who is associate administrator for the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. the FAA.

Adjusting to the fixed-price model has been a challenge for Boeing, which has long had the courage to move slowly. Scrappy SpaceX, however, was “in its natural environment,” as Berger put it.

A spokesperson told Berger that “challenges arise when the fixed-price acquisition approach is applied to serious technology development needs, or when the requirements are not firmly and specifically defined and result in back-and-forth trade-offs before a final design baseline is established.”

According to Berger, the spokesperson said: “A fixed-price contract does not provide much flexibility to solve hard problems that are common in the development of new products and capabilities.”

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