NASA has decided to bring Boeing’s allegedly passenger-rated capsule Starliner (so characterized by me because the thing is so robotic, its “crew” are merely passengers with extremely limited authority even to vet the robot’s decisions) back to the surface and leave the passengers it brought to the ISS on the ISS to await a flight next winter by SpaceX’s Dragon, running up there on one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.

We’ll see if the robot, whose thrusters often malfunction (“often” in the context of rocket flight where a couple of mistakes, or even just one, kills the crew), can make it back to the surface in one piece. Oh, and remain in that one piece, undamaged, when it regains contact with that surface.

The two Boeing crewmen will remain on the ISS until February when SpaceX is scheduled to send its Dragon up with a new load of supplies for the station. That resupply mission, though, has had to be rejiggered: it will fly with only two crewmen in order to have room for the two Boeing crewmen on the ride back down.

Which gives me an idea.

SpaceX should accelerate its schedule for refurbishing and preparing for (re)launch its Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules, and get a Falcon/Dragon mission configured and ready to go by the end of September. Then petition NASA and the FAA for licensure to launch. Put the onus for quick reaction back on the government, and show Boeing how it’s done. And show the Boeing/Lockheed-Martin’s ULA how it’s done with reusable rockets.

Come to that, I challenge Elon Musk to do that. It would be more than a one-up feather in Musk’s and SpaceX’s cap, and it would be more than a demonstration of the advantages private enterprise has over quasi-private enterprise partnered with government—in which each partner has captured the other, limiting both.

No, doing so would be a demonstration of the near-emergency capability of SpaceX to get a mission launched under the tight time constraints of an in-orbit emergency.