Supposed to Be an Eight-Day Trip to Space, How Did It Become a Daring Rescue Mission?

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Last episode we talked about the electricity business war of the nineteenth century. This time let's switch to something modern: the space rescue mission that happened back in March. Let's take in a showdown of competition and power playing out in space.

Back at the start of the year, under the quiet night sky above the International Space Station, two astronauts were anxiously waiting to be rescued. They should have already returned to Earth, but they were stuck in orbit, 400 kilometers above the ground. The one reaching out to help them was not Boeing, the giant that had dominated spaceflight for decades. It was SpaceX, a fresh private company. A rescue this dramatic isn't a movie plot. It's a real story from space.

That moment also marked the end of an era in the space race. Boeing's dominance in spaceflight had been completely overturned by SpaceX. To understand why this rescue carries so much symbolism, we first need to see how brilliant Boeing once was in space.

Boeing was founded in the early twentieth century and is a century-old name in American aerospace. Starting in the 1960s, Boeing took part in some of the greatest space projects in the United States. For example, when Apollo 11 launched toward the Moon in 1969, the first stage of the enormous Saturn V rocket that sent it there was built by Boeing. You could say Boeing deserves real credit for humanity's first landing on the Moon.

In the 1970s, Boeing also helped build the lunar rover that astronauts used on the Moon. In the 1980s and 1990s, through acquisitions of other aerospace companies, Boeing became a major participant in the Space Shuttle and space station programs. Construction of the International Space Station began in 1998, and Boeing was the prime contractor for the whole station program, responsible for coordinating the development and assembly of its modules.

For a very long time, behind almost every major American space mission you could find Boeing's fingerprints. But a halo doesn't mean Boeing never faced challenges. Entering the twenty-first century, Boeing's monopoly in space began to face pressure from new players.

That's when an eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire stepped onto the stage: Elon Musk. The story of how Musk founded SpaceX has become a startup legend. In 2002, Musk, then in his early thirties, sold his online payments company and made a large fortune. But he wasn't satisfied with just being rich. He set his sights on the stars and the sea beyond. We covered the founding story of SpaceX in earlier episodes.

All in all, after several failures, the Falcon 1 finally put a satellite into orbit in 2008. It also won a commercial resupply contract from NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, which gave the company a steady source of revenue.

That December, SpaceX succeeded in landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket vertically back on the ground after launch. The feat shocked the global aerospace community, and the age of single-use rockets seemed to be rewritten overnight. SpaceX then reflew recovered rockets again and again, pushing launch costs down to a level traditional rockets could not match.

Meanwhile, Boeing and other traditional giants were still using expendable rockets, with every launch costing hundreds of millions of dollars. They couldn't compete on cost-effectiveness with SpaceX. Musk was also good at making space exciting. Almost every launch came with a live announcement on Twitter, and some were even broadcast live, drawing lots of young people into following space.

Musk's rise with SpaceX also gave NASA a taste of working with a new company. In 2014, NASA decided to commercialize human spaceflight and picked private companies to develop crewed spacecraft. The two companies selected at the time were Boeing and SpaceX. NASA signed a contract worth up to US$4.2 billion with Boeing and one worth US$2.6 billion with SpaceX. Boeing got a far larger budget than SpaceX. The reason was simple: in NASA's eyes and in the industry's, Boeing had the experience and was the regular army of spaceflight. SpaceX had momentum but was still a rookie. Giving Boeing more funding was meant to ensure that the veteran would complete the mission steadily.

Events, however, went far beyond expectations. Both companies were supposed to complete their first test flights of crewed spacecraft around 2017, but Boeing's schedule kept slipping while SpaceX raced ahead. In May 2020, SpaceX's Crew Dragon successfully carried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. It was the first time since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011 that the United States had launched people into space from its own soil. The whole country celebrated. NASA's administrator even personally congratulated Musk. Meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner was still not ready, and even its uncrewed test had run into problems. That success was extraordinary: it meant the United States had ended a nine-year reliance on Russian crewed spacecraft. As NASA and the American public cheered for SpaceX, they couldn't help asking why Boeing had received so much more money and still had nothing to show for it.

Boeing had been expected to deliver, but it watched a newcomer beat it to the milestone, and the situation was deeply embarrassing. Boeing's first uncrewed test flight of Starliner, at the end of 2019, went wrong because of a software fault. The spacecraft nearly lost its way and failed to dock with the space station as planned, so it had to return early. That setback forced Boeing to spend heavily on improving the software and pushed back the next round of tests. It wasn't until 2022 that Starliner finally completed one uncrewed flight and docked with the space station, but a crewed flight still seemed far off, and an even more awkward situation was about to unfold. After repeated delays, Boeing finally carried out Starliner's first crewed test flight in the summer of 2024, sending two veteran NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing hoped this time it could finally prove itself. But during the flight, the spacecraft ran into one problem after another. First came a helium leak during an orbital maneuver, and then several key thrusters failed.

Even so, Starliner still managed to reach the International Space Station, and the two astronauts safely entered the station. But the next big problem was: how would they get home? The original plan was for the astronauts to stay on the station for about eight days and then return to Earth on the same spacecraft. But because of the spacecraft's many faults, NASA judged that letting the astronauts ride Starliner back was too risky. It decided to send the spacecraft back empty, uncrewed. The result was that the two astronauts were left behind at the station with no ship to bring them home. Boeing could do nothing, and NASA had to look for another way.

And so the two astronauts began a long wait in space. For them, the nine extra months they spent in space were an unexpected ordeal. They had planned to stay at the station for only eight days, but they ended up spending nearly 300 days in orbit. Fortunately, the International Space Station had plenty of supplies. The two of them exercised daily, worked, kept in touch with their families, and even completed a spacewalk during the long wait. They also spent Christmas and New Year's at the station, enjoying special holiday food stores, and kept their spirits as positive as they could.

In the end, though, the prospect of finally going home was a huge relief for them. SpaceX once again stepped forward. In late September 2024, at NASA's request, SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon to the International Space Station to bring home these two stranded astronauts. To avoid affecting the station's staffing, NASA first arranged for another crew to take over SpaceX's follow-on missions, a rotation in the true sense. Finally, in March 2025, the two astronauts boarded SpaceX's Dragon and returned to Earth, nearly nine months later than originally planned. When they landed safely in the Atlantic, waiting for them were SpaceX's recovery ship and crew. This cross-company rescue left Boeing's reputation in tatters and signaled a complete reversal of roles between the old and new powers.

Half a century ago, Boeing built the rocket that sent Armstrong to the Moon. Half a century later, Boeing's spacecraft needed Musk's spacecraft to bring its astronauts home. Few things capture the scale of that shift in the times better than this.

It's also worth noting that the year before Starliner's problems, at the end of 2022, the crewed spacecraft on the International Space Station suffered a coolant leak, leaving three crew members without a safe capsule to return in for a time. NASA immediately asked SpaceX whether it could provide an extra Crew Dragon as a backup lifeboat. In the end, Russia launched a new spacecraft of its own to solve the problem, but the episode showed how much NASA had come to rely on SpaceX. In the past, when something like this happened, NASA would probably have turned to Russia or waited patiently for Boeing. Now SpaceX had become one of the options it considered.

There's no exaggeration in saying Boeing's space business has fallen into trouble. First, the Starliner program has been repeatedly delayed and has run into one problem after another, leaving Boeing with no face left in front of NASA. NASA originally wanted two suppliers competing side by side as backups for each other, but now it can only rely on SpaceX, and Boeing has lost its say. Second, the super heavy-lift SLS rocket that Boeing helped build finally flew successfully, but it is extremely expensive and launches very rarely. In the future it may well be replaced by newer designs, such as the Starship rocket SpaceX is developing. If NASA cuts its investment in SLS, Boeing's advantage in deep-space launch will disappear too.

Look at the commercial market, too. SpaceX has taken big slices of the cake, from communication satellite launches to deploying Starlink. Even many of the U.S. military's launch contracts have moved to SpaceX. The traditional rockets Boeing runs through ULA are gradually losing competitiveness, and whether the new Vulcan rocket can stand up to SpaceX remains an open question. All in all, whether it's crewed flight to orbit, deep-space launch or the commercial launch market, Boeing is now facing unprecedented pressure and challenges.

You might ask: why would the mighty Boeing be pushed into such a predicament by a newer startup? The cause is certainly not an accident. It's the combined effect of technology, strategy, capital and more.

Let's take a closer look at why SpaceX could outperform Boeing across the board. On the technical side, SpaceX and Boeing were built on almost two different eras. SpaceX's proudest innovation is reusable rocket technology. The first stage of the Falcon 9 can often fly more than ten times, which was unimaginable in the past.

Boeing, as a traditional giant, has always used expendable rockets, which are thrown away after each launch, so costs stay high. By contrast, SpaceX is ahead not only in rocket recovery. In its new generation of heavy rockets, the stainless steel rapid manufacturing process and the newly developed Raptor engine are also far more advanced than Boeing's current rocket designs. The new NASA rocket that Boeing leads development on, the SLS, reuses engines from the Space Shuttle era, and its development cycle has been very long. Although the SLS made its first flight successfully in 2022, each launch costs several billion dollars, so it cannot be used frequently.

If SpaceX's Starship is successfully developed, it will be able to cheaply and frequently send far more payloads into space, which could well make old-school rockets like the SLS obsolete. On the crewed spacecraft side, SpaceX's Crew Dragon uses a fully digital touchscreen and a highly automated design, so astronauts mostly only need to monitor it. Boeing's Starliner control interface is comparatively traditional, and it once failed on its first flight because of a software problem. The gap in technical innovation is clear. And SpaceX's launch cadence is something traditional companies find hard to match. Take 2022 as an example: SpaceX completed 61 launches that year, roughly one rocket going up almost every week, a historic record. By contrast, United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, carried out fewer than ten missions in the same year. Such a huge difference in efficiency naturally makes NASA and commercial customers prefer SpaceX's services.

Beyond technology, the two companies are also completely different in strategy and corporate culture. Boeing, as an old defense contractor, operates in a steady and conservative way. It emphasizes following procedures and fears risk. Every new product has to go through layers of approval and justification. It would rather go slower than risk a single mistake. This cautious approach once earned Boeing a reliable reputation, but in a fast-changing era it has begun to look sluggish.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is more like an internet startup that follows a philosophy of rapid iteration. It dares to test often and even lets prototypes explode during trials, using experimental data to improve designs quickly. Musk has even said that if you haven't had a few rockets explode, it means you're not innovating fast enough. Such bold behavior is almost unimaginable in traditional aerospace. On top of that, SpaceX is relatively small, its decision chain is short, and Musk as its leader can make calls quickly.

A giant aerospace company like Boeing has a huge organization, with many subcontractors involved in each project. Every change requires coordination among many parties, so progress is naturally much slower. Put another way, SpaceX is like a nimble speedboat, while Boeing is a massive cruise ship, and it can't turn around easily.

Musk's personal image among the public is also a big advantage for SpaceX. Many people call him a real-life Iron Man. He is often active on social media and chats with fans about future topics such as Mars colonization and the Starlink project. Whenever SpaceX has a major launch, Musk's posts on Twitter are the first to show progress, keeping public curiosity at a fever pitch. By comparison, few people could name Boeing's executives. They rarely appear in the media and lack Musk's kind of legendary aura.

Today, when people think of space exploration, many young people's idol is Musk, not the leaders of traditional aerospace companies. This celebrity effect has also helped SpaceX attract more young engineers, creating a positive cycle. The difference in how the two companies handle their funding has also shaped the balance of their competition.

For a long time, Boeing has relied on the U.S. government's cost-plus contracts. In other words, whatever the project costs, the government reimburses it and adds a set profit. Under this model, Boeing has little incentive to cut costs. Budget overruns and schedule delays are common, because the longer the project drags on, in a sense, the more Boeing earns. Starliner has run over budget several times over the years, and Boeing has absorbed a lot of extra costs itself. SpaceX, meanwhile, has a fixed-price contract, so if it fails to deliver results, it doesn't get the full payment. That forces it to be frugal and deliver on time. As it turned out, SpaceX completed the crewed spacecraft development with a smaller budget and was the first to put it into operation, while Boeing received more money and fell behind.

SpaceX has also been actively developing commercial markets, winning satellite launch contracts and advancing the Starlink project to bring in revenue. Musk has even poured money he earned from Tesla into SpaceX to support its long-term research. By comparison, Boeing is huge but has many businesses, and it has to look after defense, military, civil aviation and other fields at the same time. It may not be willing to bet everything on space innovation.

On top of that, Boeing has taken repeated blows in the commercial airliner market in recent years, so it is naturally more hesitant about new projects. In short, SpaceX is willing to burn money in pursuit of its dreams, while Boeing cares more about its financial reports and shareholder returns. Their visions are different, so the level of investment naturally differs too. In fact, Boeing's situation is also a reflection of the transformation that the entire traditional space industry is going through.

Beyond SpaceX, the United States has also seen the rise of new space companies such as Blue Origin, and China's space program has also advanced rapidly in recent years. New forces keep emerging, and traditional giants have to change their thinking to survive. Boeing is certainly not willing to leave the stage of history, but to revive itself it will have to come up with innovative moves to meet this new wave in space. Has Boeing's space era truly come to an end? Not necessarily.

Boeing still holds a rich store of technical know-how and government resources, and it remains an indispensable partner for NASA in some areas. For example, Boeing has taken part in developing some modules for NASA's lunar space station, the Gateway project. In the future, if Boeing's Starliner can overcome its difficulties and enter operational service, NASA may use it to add to the honor and assurance of carrying astronauts. But there is no doubt that Boeing's days of dominating space are gone for good.

The new space era belongs to those who dare to innovate and break with convention. Musk and his SpaceX are unquestionably at the center of this era. The competition between the old king of space, Boeing, and the newcomer SpaceX is destined to become a well-told story in the history of aerospace. For those of us who love space, being able to witness such a dramatic change with our own eyes is a great privilege. In the future, whether Boeing can make a comeback or SpaceX keeps creating miracles, what will humanity's future look like? The road to exploring the universe will be made even more exciting by this contest. Let's wait and see how the brilliant new space age unfolds.

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