Boeing Starliner Will Fly 6 Times -- and Maybe Never Again
It's official now. On August 31, NASA confirmed its announcement -- first made back in June -- that it has awarded SpaceX five more contracts to fly astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). With that confirmation in hand, we now know that through 2030, the "Commercial Crew Transportation" program, or CCT, will comprise a total of 14 SpaceX missions to ISS and only six for Boeing (NYSE: BA).
This is a curious conclusion to a program that began with a controversial decision -- to pay Boeing 61.5% more for the same work SpaceX would be performing. And it certainly hasn't turned out as Boeing and others probably expected it would. But why didn't it?
If you think back to September 2014, when NASA first announced that SpaceX and Boeing would lead its CCT project, it sort of made sense for NASA to pay Boeing a premium. After all, at the time, neither Boeing nor SpaceX had a working human-rated spacecraft built yet.
Source Fool.com
