And both Boeing and SpaceX have experienced technical issues recently, adding to the delays. The early schedule slips occurred primarily because Congress did not allocate enough funding for commercial crew, NASA officials have said. At the time, NASA said the goal was to have at least one of those capsules operational by the end of 2017.
Boeing got $4.2 billion to develop its CST-100 Starliner capsule, and SpaceX snagged $2.6 billion for Crew Dragon. In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX emerged from the pack with multibillion-dollar awards from NASA's Commercial Crew Program. In those early days, the stated goal was to get at least one private American crew-carrying vehicle up and running by the end of 2016. The next year, NASA awarded a total of nearly $270 million to four companies for such work - SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada. NASA began funding commercial-crew activities in 2010, in an attempt to spur the development of private astronaut taxis that will fill the shuttle's shoes. This dependence was always going to be temporary. (Virgin Galactic has performed two crewed spaceflights since December 2018, but that company's SpaceShipTwo is a suborbital vehicle.) Ever since then, NASA has bought seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, for more than $80 million apiece at current prices. The United States has been unable to get people to and from orbit without help since July 2011, when NASA's space shuttle fleet retired after 30 years of service.
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