Regardless of sourcing, this is the kind of article that gets people talking, and can be self-fulfilling.
I don't see the value to Boeing, or its traumatized shareholders, in continuing the losses.
Starliner isn't fully reusable, so unlikely to ever be really profitable. It is a very poor start to any wider space ambitions.
If I was Boeing's CEO, I would have confidentially got the conversation rolling too. But this is off the record, deep background. No attribution on those statements, please!
Dragon has a more integrated design. It has a "trunk module" which is a kind of service module lite.
So presumably, Dragon is not completely reusable (the trunk is discarded), but more reusable than Starliner in that greater functionality is preserved in the reusable capsule.
Agreed. In that, Dragon is a better design overall. At least they can see what went wrong with the propulsion pods after the craft lands. To do that for Starliner would require an EVA and do things to the craft it was definitely not designed to do.
If a faulty pod could be detached, the sane EVA would be to close the docking hatch, depressurise the capsule, open its side hatch, detach the pod and put it inside the capsule in a way it wouldn't bang on everything (it'd still contaminate everything with its remaining propellants), close the hatch and let it come back to Earth with the remaining functioning propulsion pods.
