Starliner: Nasa to fly new Boeing space craft to ISS

When Nasa announced that SpaceX and Boeing would take over from the old space shuttles, it gave them both a similar contract, one that would bring their capsules into service and then pay for six operational missions. The SpaceX contract was worth $2.6bn while Boeing got $4.2bn. SpaceX was able to fly its crew flight test in 2020. This means Boeing is four years behind. The company has also spent a lot of money to put things right.

Dr Barber said SpaceX and other start-ups had a new approach to technology development that led to greater innovation.

“You have a traditional space company (in Boeing) that has been around a long time and does things in a certain way and you have a new space company which has done things in a different way, by building, testing, crashing, learning and then building again and so their development cycle is very rapid,” he told BBC News.

Boeing’s commercial crew programme manager Mark Nappi told reporters at a news conference that finding faults in test flights was a normal part of the process in developing a new spacecraft.

“Design and development has constant ups and downs, but the overall slope is always up. So that is where we have got to today. We are basically at the top of that slope”.

The arrival of Boeing’s spacecraft into service will mean competition for SpaceX which should bring down costs, according to Libby Jackson, who is the head of space exploration for the UK Space Agency.

“That is really important not just for Nasa, but for other space agencies, such as the UK Space Agency, because we are spending the taxpayers’ money getting our astronauts to the ISS and we want the best value for money,” she said.