> without blowing anyone up...

Yet

NASA does does not trust Boeing to return those astronauts to Earth alive. That is pretty devastating.

Thats no loonger the standard since many have done that by now. The standard is now manned cost to orbit. The race to the bottom in cost to orbit will inspire the next round of awe inducing spin off whose race to the bottom will then do the same for the next round... we are capturing the ripplesin the pond of capability improvement right now that has been held up for fifty years by space trvel being stuck in the realm of government (computing advancements held us back too so maybe only the last twenty years is attributable to the gocernment).

Getting things into orbit is table stakes. Boeing needed to prove that they could build a reliable crew vehicle on a reasonable budget, and by that measure they have failed.

They did get a manned crew to space, yes. But the foremost expert agency on spaceflight, NASA, does not trust that craft to get the crew back down.

NASA doesn't trust them to get said crew back. That's pretty damning. Instead of 8 days, they will stay up there for 8 months.

The point of Starliner is not simply to get a manned crew to space, it is to implement a reusable ship. People forget that Starliner lands in the desert and is reusable.

That is a far more complicated job than sending a manned crew to space, which is, as other have indicated, table stakes at this point. Coming down safely and going back up with the same hardware is the required part of Starliner that massively failed.

The Starliner crew had to go manual while approaching ISS because the autonomous docking software couldn't handle the five failed thrusters.

Watch the crew entering ISS. Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0>

This is not 1962 when that was impressive . Boeing et. al. has been blundering since at least the 90s.

The last two decades of progress has come almost exclusively from “new space”.

If you don’t get the crew safely back to earth again it doesn’t count.

I'd suggest it was more like they limped across the finish line rather than finishing strong.

> without blowing anyone up

Not for lack of trying

Something the USSR did in 1961…