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Only to those wanting to contract cheap commercial launch services with such an entity. Of course, the entity would have significantly worse cost structures compared to the same system as it is flown today and, faced with a mostly captive customer base, would have no incentive to provide its...

Where's the market? The ISS is supposed to be destroyed after the end of the new Boeing contract. The commercial space station market is nowhere to be found. And the spacecraft is not fit for more than a few days in LEO without a destination to dock to.

"NASA", or its political leadership?

NASA already have a crew-rated launch system and spacecraft. And it can go much farther and support life much longer.

I hope that one of these days, the reason for Twitter's current parent company wanting out of flying this spacecraft as soon as possible will become public.

Who is supposed to finance the purchase of a launch system that is being shut down and a human-rated spacecraft that has no future?

Presumably, its smaller Japanese cousin is still in working order?

The whole "crisis" boils down to a bunch of payloads not currently having launch slots because their operators didn't contract for them when they were still available. 30, 40, 50 fewer slots per year, starting a couple of years down the line, is going to be painful (i.e. expensive) for those...

Every commercial megaconstellation will end up with their own launch services. If you're just doing the occasional satellite launch, you'll remain a customer in the commercial launch services market. (and possibly lament the "good old days" of affordable slots on a proven workhorse launcher)...

Ah, sure, Amazon, a company famous for not bringing the logistics part of their operation in house.

My comments are about commercial launch services for external payloads. For megaconstellations, the only way forward is to bring launch services in house.

Maybe one should first enquire whether there are indeed launch slots available on that launcher and, further, actually purchase a few just to be sure, before starting work on redesigning hardware in a way that makes it largely incompatible with any other launch service provider.

Indeed. The so-called crisis is the result of the leader in commercial launch services pulling out of the market entirely, and a bunch of companies that apparently "forgot" to secure launch slots for their payloads are now struggling with the realities of their insufficient planning. That...

That's an awfully convenient point to end one's telling of that story. Almost as if the entire argument would turn out obviously specious if the story were relayed in full.

I'm not sure how the article you linked to supports that assertion.

Exactly. The commercial launch services market is tiny. So tiny, in fact, that the current leader in commercial launch services doesn't intend to keep its working launcher around once its internal payloads move to another launcher. And yet, we have several companies with no apparent internal...

I include every single commercial launch services company that doesn't have internal payloads to warrant the development of their specific flavour of rocket.

Turns out, commercial launch services are not an exciting growth market that would warrant even a fraction of the current potential market participants spending huge R&D budgets to reinvent a rocket. So it's becoming the logistics part of a megaconstellation (or, orbital data centres, if you...

Didn't you hear? Twitter's current parent company is getting out of the commercial launch services business with its only working launcher, and currently not offering alternatives.

Given the financial and technical realities of the Starliner program, trying to dump it on ULA would likely be opposed by Boeing's current partner, NASA, and anyone interested in continuing ULA beyond its current ownership.