That lists SpaceX, Orbital Sciences (since merged into Northrup Grumman), Blue Origin (which remains suborbital, though the orbital New Glenn is due for launch this year and Blue Moon is in development), Bigelow Aerospace (defunct), SpaceDev/Sierra Nevada Corporation (active, but struggling?), and Virgin Galactic (suborbital space tourism).
Wikipedia has a maintained list of current private spaceflight ventures, principally SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab*, Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space*, and Sierra Space. (Starred are additions to the space.com article's list).
Boeing has a decision to make: keep investing in Starliner, or cut the program now, and avoid having to do a bunch of rework to fix it plus at least one more test flight (and possibly two?) on their own dime.
It's not really clear (to me) how likely either of those outcomes is right now.
IF they drop it, then I would expect NASA to run a new commercial crew program. They need redundancy, and they don't want to be running the development process themselves.
Dream Chaser Space System (their crewed variant) is almost certainly the best-placed candidate to win an award from that program: they have an almost-flying cargo variant that was originally designed to be human rated, and existing plans to complete the crewed variant.
SpaceX might get some money for Starship, although I would expect NASA to try to write the rules such that they're not eligible. While having two options from a single company is better than just one, a fully-independent option would be better.
Blue Origin has some experience with the New Shepard capsule, and is working on their Blue Moon lander: I expect that they would cobble together a proposal, and perhaps between their previous experience in losing bids due to over-pricing, and NASA's experience with Starliner's fixed-price failure, the price might end up somewhere in the middle?
Maybe Northrop-Grumman would propose a Cygnus-derived vehicle? It'd need a human-rated launcher -- Dream Chaser would likely be using Vulcan, and Falcon9 is a dependency on SpaceX. NG would probably like to use its own Antares 330 booster, but then they'd be running both a crew vehicle and a booster program which is a lot of money and risk.
It's not entirely implausible that someone buys Starliner from Boeing, and attempts to complete the development (if Boeing gives up). Blue Origin is possibly the most likely candidate? They have Jeff's cash mountain, and a kinda compatible "old space" culture -- if Boeing is willing to sell it at a reasonable price, it's possibly a cheap way to get 80% of the way there?
Given the results from this commercial crew round (a likely 50% success), funding two programs with the expectation of one success seems reasonable. Whether they are able to get commercial interest in a fixed-price award like last time is an open question, as is who might apply.
> Boeing has a decision to make: keep investing in Starliner, or cut the program now
They can't cut the program. They are contracted to NASA. If they try to bail out, they'll be breaching a major federal government contract, which could have serious negative consequences for their ability to win future federal contracts – not just NASA, but more importantly the Pentagon too.
If Boeing really wants out, the only plausible way is they convince NASA management to cancel the contract. That way Boeing can officially claim that they performed adequately, and the cancellation was due to NASA's own decision, not their own failures.
> If Boeing really wants out, the only plausible way is they convince NASA management to cancel the contract. That way Boeing can officially claim that they performed adequately, and the cancellation was due to NASA's own decision, not their own failures.
Alternatively they could convince a judge that NASA was being unreasonable by not certifying and completing this flight, if this goes to court, which many federal contracting squabbles do.
That would be a very high risk move - significant chance a federal judge says “I refuse to second guess NASA’s own engineers on astronaut safety”. In the unlikely event they prevail at the District Court level, I doubt it would be held up on appeal. And if they lose, their reputation will be even more in tatters than it already is.
At this rate SpaceX will have two certified manned launch vehicles (Crew Dragon, Starship) by the time any other providers have a functioning platform.
(yes it will be years before Starship is human-certified... but Starliner has already had MORE years)
And Starship is already putting in some work for the lunar lander variant of the Starship. Sure, launching humans from the moon has different requirements and contingency plans than launching them from earth, but having a lunar lander ready in ~2027 is going to make it a lot easier to then human-rate it for earth-based launches.
ULA is one thing, they are highly successful and established. Starliner is a lemon. I think it would be better for them to develop a capsule based on their own New Shepard vehicle.
I think it's mostly a question of how NASA assesses the vehicle: is it going to be an endless series of patches on a fundamentally flawed base? Or is it somewhere over 50% done, with some software cleanup, thruster fixes, and some decent QA and then good to go?
Rejigging New Shepard with appropriate docking, heat shielding, maneuvering thrusters, life support, power, cooling, etc, etc, etc, is a huge project. Certainly it's a head start, but I think it'd be a ground-up redesign with that as experience and maybe a starting point for beefed-up parts.
Lockheed has Orion, they could modify it for Vulcan or Falcon. Overkill for LEO but at least it's functional. Realistically NASA will have to go through another round of requests for proposal, though I don't know how much interest there will be after Boeing's troubles and with ISS disposal looming.
I've seen papers outlining an Orion docking to the ISS. It was considered as part of the conops back when Orion was part of Constellation rather than Artemis.
Note that the Crew version still seems to be aspirational. And the base-model Cargo version isn't exactly flying in the fast lane, either - "[first] demonstration mission is planned for launch no earlier than 2025."
And note that it took SpaceX almost 10 years to go from Demo-1 of their Cargo Dragon to Demo-1 of their Crew Dragon.
Sierra's Dream Chaser Cargo System variant was due to launch on the second Vulcan test flight this year, but it was recently announced that it wouldn't be ready for that. It's now vaguely scheduled for 2025.
The crew version of Dream Chaser is kinda on hold as they try to get the cargo version flying (they say they're still working on it, but I guess the cargo version is first priority): it'll take a bunch of work to get it completed and certified, but it should be less than starting from scratch.
Once flying, they've got a NASA contract to run 6 resupply missions to the ISS (assuming they can get it flying in time before ISS is deorbited), plus a single flight contract with the UN (!)
Both Dream Chaser and Starliner are proposed as crew transports for Blue Origin's Orbital Reef station.
