I suspect SpaceX benefited from the closer scrutiny they received from NASA and regulatory agencies, especially after Musk smoked pot on Joe Rogan‘s podcast. I’m sure he would’ve liked to “innovate” more by cutting corners but wasn’t able to because of the scrutiny, so they had to do a better job of dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. In contrast Boeing has spent several decades trying to convince the government they don’t need close scrutiny because they know what they’re doing. As the builder of some of the 20th century’s best-regarded aircraft and spacecraft, they’d largely been given that lax oversight by the 2010s. We now see the legacy of this, as lax oversight allowed them to cut the corners everyone assumed SpaceX wanted to cut, with hundreds of people dead as a result.

When the Commercial Crew Program was first announced everyone assumed Boeing would easily ace the project and SpaceX would struggle, maybe even fail. Now I’m just hoping we don’t see two more dead courtesy Boeing before the year’s end.