America’s space program is no longer a nationalist vanity project but a serious matter of strategic interest.
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After so many months of dithering, fumbling, and excuse-making, NASA finally announced it has a plan to bring back stranded astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore — next year. The two astronauts were originally supposed to return to Earth in mid-June, but because their spacecraft, Boeing’s new shuttle Starliner, experienced a malfunction, they are scheduled to return on the SpaceX Dragon in February.
Understandably, NASA has downplayed the embarrassing fact that the eight-day mission has expanded into more than eight months. They have also downplayed the other embarrassing fact that the aerospace juggernaut Boeing, which was awarded $1.6 billion more than SpaceX in their fixed-price contracts, utterly failed to produce a comparable product to Elon Musk’s much smaller upstart company.
