Given Boeing’s history here this feels like the right kind of contract for this sort of work. Ensures all incentives are aligned
The issue is that incentives absolutely aren't aligned. The moment Boeing thinks it has achieved a certain part of the contract but NASA does not you have a huge problem on your hand where one side will try to get work done for free and the other has absolutely zero interest as they are not getting paid.
If cost overruns are too great Boeing might also (depending on the contract) choose to withdraw, as the continuing development cost will be greater than any penalties from the contract.
Who besides Spacex or ULA can reasonably bid for it? Or are you also looking at foreign options?
It might not be Starliner but it seems like it'd be good to keep ULA in the game, just to make sure that Spacex is not the only option.
If you're doing some low risk building, say a 10 mile road on flat ground with known soil, replacing a previous road, that is well-known to current specs with set-in-stone requirements (no pun intended) it is easy to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor will know exactly what to do, and there are 20 road building companies that could do the work.
Now, building an advanced spacecraft with a host of uncertainties in a vastly more complex environment that may require novel technologies development and a great deal of engineering is very different if you want to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor perspective is that is very risky, and there are likely going to be changing requirements.
The contractors will want to make the Govt pay for that risk, since they are on the hook for it. All risk is on the contractor. The contractor will also fight for $ for every changing requirement.
By comparison, in a time & materials contract, the risk is on the government, and changing requirements don't matter much, if you change them, risk is still on the government.
This explains why firm-fixed price is not always the best approach, and sometimes time & materials contracts may make for a more economical acquisition approach - because risk and changing reqs can translate into dollars.
Software has the same problems. An unreasonable expectation of being able to predict the future (except the bits they don't want you to know about), and a lot of whining when we run into unexpected issues.
Haha, nice.
Didn't last time
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/poop-space-revisited-apo...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/nasa-chief-says-cost...
Any contract type where the political leadership can't terminate a contract for cause due to excessive political pressure, or is forced into paying through the nose, is untenable.
The solution for that is not Firm Fixed Price or T&M contracts - but instead larger budgets and also multiple award contracts where you have simultaneous efforts competing against each other. When there are 5 options, all having company skin in the game, all as viable paths forward, and 1 option loses out, terminating for cause, enriching the other 4, no harm no foul.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/weirdly-a-nasa-officia...