A misstep for NASA's space program becomes a giant leap for SpaceX.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. On Friday, a Boeing Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station to return to Earth without its crew.

NASA astronaut Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore stayed behind due to uncertainty about the safety of the Boeing craft.

The duo will instead hitch a ride back on a SpaceX mission set to arrive at the ISS in February.

It's another win for the company owned by Elon Musk,

which has come to dominate rocket launches in the US.

But NASA's reliance on SpaceX now is a bit of a reversal

according to Stephen Feldstein. He's a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment's

Democracy, Conflict, and governance program.

It wasn't that long ago that SpaceX faced lots of skepticism from NASA and from the

overall industry when it came to whether it would actually be able to be an effective company and come up with rockets in the right types of procedures so that they could be reliable in the future.

And so to have this about face now where all of a sudden SpaceX is the one that NASA is relying on to salvage a mission that's gone pretty awry I think is a really interesting and pretty surprising turn of events.

Yeah and what does it kind of say about the current space landscape?

Well it's changing very quickly. You know, Boeing, which is the contractor with the Starliner, has been involved in a space program really from the very beginning days. And now to see a moment where a relative newcomer has come

in and really upended the traditional relationship and done things in a way that's very different than a norm.

I think really speaks to the disruptive moment that NASA in the space program is currently facing.

Tell me more about how dominant SpaceX has kind of become in this landscape.

Well, it really has become at this point the main alternative when it comes to being able to construct and come up with rockets

that will allow the space program to eventually return humans to the moon and to do things beyond.

Other than SpaceX, there really isn't any other competitor in the

landscape who is able to play that role other than what Boeing was attempting to do

with its Starliner program. And yet NASA has been kind of reluctant to rely on the company, right?

...