Elon Musk said Boeing surpassed SpaceX years ago by achieving the first historic human spaceflight

• Elon Musk criticized Boeing about X before the first astronaut flight into space.

• SpaceX beat out Boeing by flying NASA astronauts to the space station more cheaply four years ago.

• Musk said Boeing has “too many non-technical executives.”

Elon Musk worsened the day of Boeing’s first astronaut flight into space by criticizing the company on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.

Boeing built the Starliner spacecraft in collaboration with NASA and will launch into space Monday evening, carrying astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station.

But SpaceX surpassed them in 2020 when it became the first private company to fly astronauts into space, marking a nine-year hiatus from U.S. human spaceflight.

Musk was sure to draw attention to this in his X post on Monday, stating that “SpaceX was finished 4 years early.” Boeing did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that achieved this feat came from the same NASA initiative that flew Starliner on Monday. That effort, called the Commercial Crew Program, provided Boeing with $4.2 billion to design, build and test the spacecraft.

Not only did SpaceX do it faster, but the spacecraft was cheaper, costing NASA only $2.6 billion. Since its first crewed flight in 2020, the company has flown seven astronaut crews to the ISS for NASA, with an eighth currently living on the station. He also flew four special missions.

While SpaceX makes money on each flight, Boeing pours more and more funds into Starliner.

Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, drew attention to the inequality in X on Monday morning. He attributed this to “too many non-technical managers at Boeing.”

Musk was republishing an Ars Technica article by the publication’s senior space editor Eric Berger that detailed “how Boeing has decisively lost the commercial crewed space race, and it has proven to be a very costly affair.”

There were clear technical reasons for the delays. During Starliner’s first attempt to fly uncrewed to the ISS, software errors forced it to return to Earth early. A series of problems then caused further delays, including dysfunctional valves in the propulsion system.

But commentators like Musk and Berger say there is an underlying reason.

The Commercial Crew Program represents a major shift in the way NASA views its contractors. From space stations to the moon and Mars, NASA wants to foster a new competitive economy in space. The agency wants to be one of many customers for companies’ space stations, spaceships and moon bases, rather than the organization that runs it all.

This is one reason why Crew Dragon and Starliner have fixed-price contracts. NASA set the price, and then SpaceX and Boeing had to build and fly their spaceships to NASA’s specifications.

After all, the companies would have other customers on their spaceships. They weren’t just doing these for the government. So if costs start to increase, the responsibility falls on them.

This was an arrangement for Boeing, a former contractor for the Department of Defense and NASA, aviation expert George Nield previously told Business Insider.

Boeing was used to the government paying all its expenses to deliver the best possible product. In this model, “cost overruns and delays were NASA’s problem, not the company’s problem,” Berger explained.

With a suddenly fixed price, “it’s the company’s responsibility to determine what risks to take in terms of new technologies and new approaches,” said Nield, a former deputy administrator of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

Adapting to the fixed-price model has been a challenge for Boeing, which has long had the luxury of moving slowly. But belligerent SpaceX was “in its natural habitat,” as Berger put it.

“When the fixed price procurement approach is applied to serious technology development requirements, or when the requirements are not precisely and specifically defined, difficulties arise that result in back-and-forth trading before the final design basis is established,” a spokesperson told Berger.

According to Berger, the spokesperson added: “A fixed-price contract provides little flexibility in solving difficult problems that are common in new product and capability development.”

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