I still don’t understand why NASA needed two vehicles for ISS crew rotation. The Soyuz seats are about half the cost that these 7 flights of Starliner will be.

I do know that when the contracts for crewed ISS flights were let, if a major aerospace company like Boeing hadn’t bid on it, it is unlikely that one of the “new space” companies would have gotten a contract either, so it is ironic that Boeing is the one who dropped the ball, not SpaceX.

Ray Harpin, the cost depends on what research you are doing. The astronauts aboard the ISS can perform complex experiments easily because they have human brains. Trying to automate all that would make some experiments cost prohibitive. Robotics is great for somethings, but note that everything we have done so far with every single landing mission to Mars over the last DECADES could have been done by a geologist-astronaut on the surface in one afternoon.

Delay, delay, delay. Boeing is a nothing sandwich.

Just use SpaceX.