Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew
There are a lot of big organizations that seem to understand something that few of us in the software industry ever did:<p>When you have one vendor they have no reason to give you any special attention.  They are min-maxing you against all of their other customers and if you aren’t about to either Give them more money or take it away you fade into the background.<p>If you have two vendors, they have to pay attention.  They have to and get to stay engaged.<p>If SpaceX is ahead or Boeing is ahead doesn’t matter. What matters if SpaceX is still at the table.  If they drop to third or fourth place then they have a real problem.<p>NASA doesn’t want to give all their contracts to one vendor, and neither should we. That makes things easy this year but fattens then for the slaughter.<p>As long as Boeing is getting some noteworthy fraction of the contracts they stick around as a goad for SpaceX to try harder.  And SpaceX does the same for Boeing.