Companies invest in their supply chain and invest in not being beholden to a single supplier (unless they control that supplier) all the time.
It's pretty well documented by Lori Garver, one of the people involved in pushing Commercial Crew, how strong the opposition was from both NASA and Congress.
If I had his wealth, "fly in space with William Shatner" would be on my todo list too.
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
If the value of the additional supply chain does not justify paying more, they can let boeing pay out of their own pocket, or let them drop out. The whole reason Boeing was given a fixed price contract at the beginning was so that this option could be exercised.
Lowering the bar is not making an investment.
Like, I understand what you're saying here, and I agree -- if the US wants to have serious private-sector competition in the space sector, that's arguably a good thing. SpaceX's advances in reducing launch costs by implementing launch vehicle reusability to a degree that was never seriously approached before are objectively a good thing for the sector. Some of the work Firefly appears to be doing is really interesting, and could lower the cost of much of the work around launches substantially. Blue Origin also exists and may at some point be more than a billionaire's vanity project.
Boeing isn't the only competitor in this space, and some of the smaller companies are hungrier. They're actively innovating, and because their existence is on the line, they do the work to make sure their projects are beyond reproach by the time they're picking up NASA work or sending people into orbit (usually with a pretty high degree of success).
> they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit
I'm sticking to my guns here -- Boeing and NASA being in this position is not an excuse to go easy on them, cut corners, or otherwise lower any standards. If the US wants to use taxpayer money to prop up the crewed spaceflight sector (which I would agree with in principle despite it not being my tax dollars -- this is IMO an investment in the future and a way to stay competitive on the world stage), then they should reevaluate their approach to a public sector crewed spaceflight option where fewer parts of the process are profit driven.
SLS was a flop but that doesn't mean that the next thing has to be, and while public spaceflight projects absolutely do subcontract work out when it comes to building components, there are big, traditionally-expensive parts of the project that can be offloaded to public agencies where profit isn't a consideration.