After months on the margins of NASA's human spaceflight program, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is being welcomed back into the agency's crew rotation plans — a quiet but consequential moment in the long, expensive effort to ensure that no single company holds a monopoly on humanity's path to orbit. The return follows a painstaking technical reckoning between Boeing and NASA, and arrives amid pointed public pressure from SpaceX, whose own Dragon capsule has carried the weight of American crewed spaceflight largely alone. At stake is not merely one vehicle's reputation, but the broader principle