It's been a big week for human spaceflight news, starting with NASA.

The agency announcing last Saturday its astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams will be coming home on a SpaceX dragon after

NASA decided issues with Boeing's starliner meant that capsule she returned Earth

empty. It's an eight-day mission now stretching to eight months, a shocking outcome for Boeing, which over a decade ago

when NASA's commercial crew program was starting had been viewed as the front runner

over SpaceX.

What I find historically inaccurate is people who now say, well, the whole point of commercial

crew was to have two competitors and so we have to have a second. We were nearly forced by Congress and many and the

leaders of NASA to just select one competitor. We've gone through of course Space Act agreements and

helped these companies develop their vehicles but we were really receiving a lot of pressure to go down to one competitor.

And the competitor that people wanted was Boeing.

They wanted Boeing because they felt Boeing needed the lion's share of the money and they thought Boeing had a better chance of being successful

Frankly, it was really hard for NASA to grasp a company like SpaceX, you know, new to human spaceflight,

new to spaceflight generally,

that for the amounts of money they proposed that they could do this

was not

fathomable for for many people.

Lori Garver was the deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama

administration from 2009 to 2013.

She helped architect the commercial crew program that hired Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts

to the International Space Station.

She even wrote a book, escaping gravity, that details the experience.

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