Too Hard to Categorize

Interesting - but more of a business story than a space exploration story.  Perhaps even a story that shows even the Fed.gov sometimes does something right.  A Tweet by Aviation Week reporter Irene Klotz shows that SpaceX has moved ahead of every other major aerospace company in the US to become NASA’s largest for-profit vendor.  In particular, between FY '21 and '22, SpaceX leapfrogged past Boeing.  While business with Boeing grew from 1.681 to $1.718 billion, 2.2% growth, SpaceX's business grew from 1.629 to $2.044 billion, 25.5%.  Over 11 times more growth.

As you can see from her data, only the California Institute of Technology and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory gathered more funding.  Their increase was around midway between Boeing's and SpaceX's at 12.3%.  The JPL runs the majority of NASA's deep space missions, like the Mars rovers, satellites around Jupiter, Saturn, and many of those other famous probes you know of.  

The main reason for SpaceX's growth, of course, has been their success with Crew Dragon bringing manned spaceflight back to the US, Cargo Dragon for carrying supplies the Space Station, and the failure of Boeing's Starliner to achieve operational status.  When NASA awarded the contracts to both SpaceX and Boeing back in 2014 - with Boeing getting around 60% more money - to develop manned flight to the ISS, the conventional beltway wisdom was that Boeing would be the provider and the brash startup that talked about reusing boosters would fail.  You know the rest of that story. 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica points out:

Much of the funding increase for SpaceX in 2022, an increase of about $400 million over the previous year, appears to be driven by contracts for the Human Landing System as part of the Artemis Moon Program and the purchase of additional Crew Dragon missions to the space station.

That last part about purchasing additional Crew Dragon missions, which means more Crew Dragon and less Starliner, is a direct transfer of NASA money to SpaceX that would have gone to Boeing if Starliner delivered more bang for the buck.