Commercial Crew vehicles have to pass the same safety standards set for NASA’s own Orion capsule that’s still in development, and NASA, not the commercial providers, sets the rules and makes the final determination for whether they pass. Orion is itself caught up in the political machinations of the SLS project/boondoggle, and Boeing’s Starliner has suffered a ton of setbacks in trying to meet those standards of late, so SpaceX is sort of the sole US-based launch provider for crewed missions by default right now.
I agree that space is expensive, and that it’s worth it. But Russia’s space agency is not playing by international cooperation rules, and the cost of seats on Soyuz launches has steadily increased since 2006, with massive increases starting in 2011 when the Shuttle was retired.
For comparison, SpaceX is charging roughly $55 million per seat for Dragon, and Boeing plans on charging about $90 million for Starliner seats. Given that hitching a ride on a Boeing craft is projected to be more expensive than a Soyuz, cost clearly isn’t the sole consideration. The multi-provider Commercial Crew program is essentially a hedge—and at this point, a beneficial one, given Starliner and Orion’s setbacks—so that NASA doesn’t find itself beholden to the risks of a single launch platform again. The ESA and JAXA don’t have a human-rated launch platform, or the funding to construct one (they rely on NASA and Roscosmos for crewed launch services), and Roscosmos hasn’t been in the mood to play fair lately. Given the budget that NASA gets, they can’t develop and maintain multiple platforms themselves, so partnering with commercial providers is the only other alternative available to them.
If there was the political will for it, Congress could give NASA the money to buy (or at least license) SpaceX’s technology outright, but that would 1) never happen given the political climate related to private industry, and 2) be bad for all of the congresscritters whose districts rely on funding for programs like the SLS, which is why we’re instead still building Shuttle main engines (which are highly reusable) so they can be stuck onto disposable boosters and thrown away.
Musk’s considerable personal shittiness is really infuriating for me, because it makes it even harder to have any sort of unalloyed enthusiasm for what SpaceX has managed to accomplish. The folks who work there have done some incredible things that were dismissed by established space providers (including NASA) as impossible at worst or not cost-effective at best. They’ve proven a lot of people wrong, which has had a huge impact on the perception of what’s even possible to do. I don’t disagree that it’s unfortunate that those advancements are owned by a private company instead of held in trust as a national or international good, but again, NASA isn’t even being allowed to consider developing similar technology for the SLS launch platform because it’s little more than a congressional pork project masquerading as a viable heavy-left booster platform. I wish someone other than Musk were the ultimate beneficiary of NASA buying launches that use SpaceX’s technology, but reality being what it is, I’m also just glad that they exist to serve as an example at all.
I also wish the Orion and Commercial Crew programs weren’t wrapped up in a lot of nationalistic/jingoistic attitudes about America “controlling its own destiny” instead of working in a spirit of international cooperation, but wishes and horses and steak, and all that.
