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MilestoneMar 10, 2026

Starliner and Artemis: commercial label vs. commercial discipline

Starliner and Artemis: commercial label vs. commercial discipline
Image source: SpaceNews
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Taken at face value, that sounds like a narrow program failure.

NASA's Commercial Crew Program was supposed to be the template: services-based procurement, private ownership of hardware and competition between providers.

The Starliner investigation, released Feb. 19, is a case study in treating "commercial" as a contract label rather than a behavior. A program can call itself commercial.

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