what's the hot take on why boeing is doing Starliner? is it nasa's hedge against SpaceX?

Boeing is doing it to milk money off of the federal government.

NASA wanted multiple vendors (but SpaceX had to do the original work to get them to not do single source, which is how the government typically does it)

TBD on who’s running Boeing after the criminal investigations; dead whistleblowers don’t accelerate space ambitions

Boeing's Starliner program could indeed be seen as NASA's hedge against reliance on SpaceX, ensuring competition and redundancy in crewed space missions. It also aligns with NASA's strategy of maintaining multiple commercial partners for access to space. Thoughts?

They like redundancy so they don’t run into a situation where they can’t access the ISS. Of course Boeing has had years of delays so it’s possible that at one point they were the first choice…