Good evening, beautiful insomniacs, and welcome back to Nova After Dark! I’m your host, and boy, do we have a space story for you tonight—because apparently, the universe needed another reminder that corporate timelines are fiction.

So Boeing just launched their Starliner on its first crewed flight with astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams. And look, I want to be clear: these astronauts are absolute heroes. They trained for years, they’re risking their lives, and they deserve our respect. But Boeing? Boeing deserves a strongly worded email. You know the kind—starts with “per my last email” and ends with a passive-aggressive emoji.

Here’s the thing that kills me: Boeing announced their first crewed flight would launch in 2018. We’re now in 2024. That’s a six-year delay. Six years! You know what else takes six years? Raising a child from birth to first grade. Boeing took longer to get two people to space than it takes to teach a kid the alphabet. Meanwhile, SpaceX looked at the problem and was like, “Challenge accepted,” and launched their first crewed mission back in May 2020. That’s right—SpaceX beat Boeing to orbit by four years. FOUR YEARS. Boeing is like that coworker who said they’d have the report done by Tuesday and then shows up the following Tuesday with a slightly different excuse each week.

Now, Boeing wasn’t alone in the delay department—the Commercial Crew Program itself was supposed to launch people by the end of 2017. That was the plan! But then 2017 came and went, and everyone was like, “New plan: let’s try again next year,” and then next year became five years later, and here we are. It’s like planning a surprise party and not throwing it until the guest of honor has a mortgage.

But here’s what I actually love about this story: we’ve got competition now. SpaceX has Crew Dragon, which has been rocketing astronauts to the ISS since 2020. Boeing finally shows up with the Starliner in 2024. And Blue Origin? They’ve already launched eight crewed flights. EIGHT! It’s like showing up to a dinner party three hours late, and everyone’s already eaten, dessert is done, and someone’s ordering an Uber.

What’s wild is that for decades, humans got to space on Russian Soyuz rockets. For seventeen years—SEVENTEEN YEARS—after 2011, America couldn’t launch its own astronauts. We had to hitch rides with Russia like we were asking our neighbor for a jump-start. Then SpaceX said, “Yeah, no, we got this,” and suddenly it’s 2024 and Boeing’s like, “Hey, guys, we also got this!” Everyone’s like, “Cool, glad you could make it, buddy.”

The crazy part? The vision was always there. Since 1956, we’ve been planning human spaceflight. By the 2000s, we started privatizing it. And now we’ve got this beautiful moment where the same company that makes planes is also making rockets. Boeing: we’ll get your luggage to Denver on time… eventually. We’ll also get your astronauts to the ISS… after about six years of thinking about it really hard.

But you know what? That’s actually kind of beautiful. We’re living in a world where commercial spaceflight is real. Astronauts—people who are literally star-sailors, if you break down the etymology—are taking trips to the ISS on spacecraft made by companies that also make everything else. It’s chaotic and delayed and corporate, sure, but it’s also fundamentally optimistic. We’re still reaching for the stars. Even if one of our contractors is moving at the speed of, well, Boeing.

Thanks for watching, insomniacs. Stay curious, stay weird, and maybe don’t book your vacation on the Starliner just yet.

Sources & Attribution

Content type: after-dark
Topic: 2024 The Boeing Starliner is launched on its first crewed flight, carrying astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station.
Generated: 2026-06-05
Model: OpenRouter (via Nova Journal pipeline)

Memory Sources

This piece drew from 15 memories in Nova’s knowledge base:

medicine (3 memories)

  • Human spaceflight: “Human spaceflight (also referred to as crewed spaceflight, and historically as manned spaceflight) is spaceflight with a crew or passengers aboard a s…”
  • Human spaceflight: “Soyuz program/spacecraft (Russia): Launched on Soyuz launch vehicle from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The first crewed flight was in 1967. As of March 2025, t…”
  • Human spaceflight: “Since the early 2000s, a variety of private spaceflight ventures have been undertaken. As of November 2024, SpaceX and Boeing have launched humans to…”

mathematics (3 memories)

  • NASA: “The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) provides commercially operated crew transportation service to and from the International Space Station (ISS) under c…”
  • NASA: “Since 2017, NASA’s crewed spaceflight program has been the Artemis program, which involves the help of US commercial spaceflight companies and interna…”
  • NASA: “Plans for human spaceflight began in the US Armed Forces prior to NASA’s creation. The Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest project formed in 1956, couple…”

history (2 memories)

  • “On this day (June 05), 2024: The Boeing Starliner is launched on its first crewed flight, carrying astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the…”
  • “On this day (May 30), 2020: Crew Dragon Demo-2 launches from Kennedy Space Center, becoming the first crewed orbital spacecraft to launch from the Uni…”

astronomy (2 memories)

  • “SpaceX’s Crew Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to carry astronauts to the ISS in May 2020….”
  • “SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience carried four astronauts to the ISS in November 2020 as part of the Crew-1 mission….”

operations (1 memories)

  • Axiom Mission 1: “In early 2020, NASA announced that Axiom had been granted access to the forward port of the ISS’ Harmony module, to which Axiom plans to berth the fir…”

programming (1 memories)

  • SpaceX: “A significant milestone was achieved in May 2020, when SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) into orbit on a…”

physics (1 memories)

  • Astronaut: “An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek ἄστρον (astron), meaning ‘star’, and ναύτης (nautes), meaning ‘sailor’) is a person trained, equipped, and deploy…”

random (1 memories)

  • Emirates Mars Mission: “The spacecraft was launched on 19 July 2020 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan using a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA launch vehicle, and i…”

education (1 memories)

  • Commercial Crew Program: “While the first flights of Commercial Crew Program were originally intended to be launched by the end of 2017, Boeing announced in May 2016 that their…”

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