I’d be less worried about the Boeing factor here. NASA peer reviews all designs and checks the final system for anything manned or high value.
It’s possible that Boeing being incompetent and NASA being tied up with them is a cause for delays. Not sure but it seems plausible.
I wonder why they wouldn’t use Falcon Heavy though. Starship is still in development and not ready for any of this but FH is flight proven and cheaper.
They aren't using Falcon Heavy because FH isn't human rated. In any case, Starliner could get by on a Falcon 9 (in terms of required performance), but it would be a big chunk of $$$. The Starliner is a pretty wide capsule, which is why they need that skirt on the Atlas V. The skirt controls the aerodynamic transition from the fatter Starliner to the skinnier Atlas underneath. The F9 is a different diameter from the Atlas, but still narrower than the Starliner, so they'd probably need a different skirt design.
The obvious other replacement vehicle is Vulcan, which is actually fatter than the Starliner. I have no idea what integration issues that'd entail.
As for why Boeing went for Atlas? Well... SpaceX is their literal competitor. Assured access also implies being willing to take a hit on cost efficiency to ensure diversity of both crew capsule as well as launch vehicle.
They use Falcon 9 for crewed launches, not Falcon Heavy. Using FH to put starliner capsule in orbit would be massively inefficient as you don't need that much mass to orbit capability. Plus it's not rated for human flight, so there's that. Starliner can (and might) fly on an F9.
It's not just Starliner that is going to have it's maiden crewed flight but also the Atlas V rocket that will take it to orbit has never been used on a manned flight (though early variants of Atlas were used in the Mercury program in the 1960s).
Hopefully the door to the ship doesn’t fly open during the mission …
If there were decent competition or many firms in the space I wonder if Boeing’s failures in quality making planes would affect its ability to get government contracts
Nothing would surprise me at this point. Every time they address a problem they find a bunch of new ones. God knows how many more they're introducing in the process. I wouldn't want to fly on that thing unless the Boeing CEOs (current and previous) were also present.
Please note that SpaceX has successfully launched 12 crewed flights, and their "full self pilot roborocket" has landed itself 300 times so far, with the oldest boosters having flown 20 times each (and SpaceX plans to stretch that to 40 flights each).
If you don't like Elon Musk, you can say so, but that's no reason to be dismissive of SpaceX's overwhelming success as a spaceflight company.
If the poster doesn't like Elon Musk (clearly doesn't, from the extreme snark) then Elon's relationship with SpaceX seems like a very valid reason to consider them together, whether you think the company is doing well or not.
It's kind of silly to tell someone the CEO has no impact on a company and that the CEOs previous antics are no reason to dismiss the company's current output.
