Somehow NASA just realized Boeing Starliner is BETTER than SpaceX Crew Dragon...

Boeing has spent more than a decade and covered losses of more than half a billion dollars trying to build the CST-100 Starliner, a class of two partially reusable spacecraft designed to transport crew to the International Space Station and other low-Earth orbit destinations. It's fallen far behind its sister commercial crew spacecraft, Dragon, by several years on track. Could this lag be offset by better technologies than Dragon? It's the time to find out how Boeing Starliner is better than SpaceX Crew Dragon. Well, to be fair, Starliner has some strengths of its own when compared to SpaceX Dragon. Firstly, Starliner can land on land or in an emergency water. Crew Dragon lands only on water. In fact, SpaceX originally envisioned landing legs extending through the heat shield in a propulsive landing, but as work moved forward updating the Dragon capsule to human rating, it proved to be a complex modification. While each water landing is more expensive and salt water adds some complexity to refurbishing the capsule for reuse, this decision avoided a lot of cost in design and certifying this new capability. On the other side, Starliner will land using parachutes and a set of large airbags. A pair of drogue chutes are deployed at about 9 kilometers in altitude, followed by a trio of main chutes at 3.6 kilometers. And at 1.5 kilometers in altitude, the heat shield is ditched and the six airbags are inflated. These airbags serve a dual purpose. In nominal use cases, the airbags will soften the landing when landing on land, and in off-nominal cases like an abort or emergency re-entry, the airbags offer buoyancy and balance for water landings. Touching down on land would allow Starliner an easy path to refurbishment and reusability. Boeing is hoping to be able to turn one around in just six months and reuse them up to 10 times. That's definitely a good thing. Since the crew would land on solid ground, recovery of the crew is quite different than a splashdown. On the edge of the landing zone, there'd be a Mobile Data Tracking Vehicle, or MDTV, as well, and then a Mobile Landing Control Center, or MLCC, as well as a host of recovery vehicles waiting to pounce. In short, Starliner can be easier to reuse than Dragon, in theory. This is also related to the second part that we want to mention. Let's look at these pictures. Can you see the biggest difference between Dragon and Starliner after landing? Well, Starliner looks so much cleaner than Dragon. In fact, it is not just Dragon. Many other capsules, including the Apollo capsules that return from the moon and the hundreds of Soyuz capsules. So how does Boeing do this? A simple reason for this is the Starliner uses a proprietary ablative heat shield on its blunt end, but uses the same thermal blanket technology that the Space Shuttle used on the upper portion of the vehicle. In other words, it's a reusable non-ablative series of materials of either silica fiber or reinforced carbon-carbon ceramics. The Shuttle TPS did not burn away on re-entry. So we'll wonder, why doesn't SpaceX Dragon use non-ablative reinforced carbon-carbon heat shields like parts of Starliner? Well, actually, such complexity with heat shielding isn't necessary for the Dragon spacecraft. Instead, SpaceX Dragon spacecraft use ablative heat shielding based on a NASA technology tweaked to SpaceX standards, PICA-X, phenolic impregnated carbon ablator. PICA-X is strong, durable, and even reusable heat shielding. Most importantly, it's monolithic one-piece shielding. Thermal protection tiles like those used on the Space Shuttle were designed to be reusable, but required hours of maintenance and were quite fragile and sensitive to damage. Using reinforced carbon-carbon would have been overkill and expensive. SpaceX wants to fly as often as possible. You can't do that if you're screwing around with tiles for days and days. Making a simple ablative heat shield that's durable so it can handle anything a single mission can throw at it simply keeps the safety variables of re-entry far simpler than any shuttle entry. The back shell uses a low-temperature ablative made by SpaceX called SPAM. After a crew or cargo Dragon returns from space, both SPAM and PICA-X is removed from the spacecraft and replaced. Notably, there's one important thing SpaceX can't do like the Starliner at this point, re-boost the ISS. Boeing Starliner can perform altitude boost because they have robust aft-oriented thrusters in the service modules. CST-100 has four 39,700 pound thrust 176.6 kilonewtons launch abort engines for the CST-100s. 24 orbital maneuvering and altitude control thrusters OMAC 1,500 pounds of thrust 6.7 kilonewtons for each for launch abort attitude control state separation functions large orbital maneuvers. Also are included 28 reaction control system engines or RCS. Each of them 100 pounds of thrust at 0.44 kilonewtons and these are using similar technology to other engines in CST-100. RCS's role is to re-boost the International Space Station. Let's say even the above engines, the bigger ones, could be used sometimes to help re-boosting faster the ISS if there's enough fuel in their respective tanks. But with or without them, the RCS can accomplish the re-boosting procedure for ISS. SpaceX's cargo and crew Dragon vehicles, by contrast, eschewed a traditional service module in favor of a mostly empty trunk in order to maximize the amount of a Dragon spacecraft that could be reused. Typically, a service module is jettisoned before a capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere. However, NASA has said SpaceX is working on potential modifications to Dragon that it might be capable of station re-boost. Crew Dragon, of course, allows NASA to have independent access to the station for its astronauts. If that vehicle didn't exist, NASA would be in a weak position with Russia. Finally, despite the presence of SpaceX Dragon, we can't help but include Boeing Starliner as the significant contribution to U.S. space. Space is playing an increasingly active role in everyday life, whether that's through the rise of space tourism or satellite internet. That makes this moment an important milestone for competition in the commercial space industry. It's also a critical step forward for anyone worried that the future of space is already too dependent on a single company, one that's largely controlled by Elon Musk. SpaceX was once seen as a new space actor, but today it's so dominant you can see it's a legacy actor, said Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar of space policy, spoke this to Recode. NASA collaborated with Boeing through the Commercial Crew Program because of the fear that if you just have dependency on one company, you might be in trouble in case something goes wrong. If you only have one, you're locked into that situation where you might end up paying a lot of money because there's no one else competing for the business, and it's enormously expensive, explained Christina Chaplin, a space analyst who previously reviewed space programs for the Government Accountability Office. It's important to keep costs low, and having that kind of competition is how you do it. The nightmare scenario of a space monopoly isn't too different from the fear of a monopoly here on Earth. If just one company gains too much control over the space market and gets too far ahead with its tech, it's possible that future competitors could be blocked out of space for good. That means a single company like SpaceX could end up with an enormous amount of influence over how humans visit and utilize resources in space. The stakes here are almost unimaginable. This is the biggest reason for NASA to wait that long for Boeing. After all, hope that Starliner can soon send people to the ISS, or not all this becomes meaningless. And that just about wraps it up for today's episode. Don't forget to share your ideas in the comment section below. Everyone's support is motivation for us to create more quality content. Thanks and we'll see you next time.