(1) GLASGOW POSTS WORLDCON CONVENTION GUIDE. Glasgow 2024’s Convention Guide is available for the public to download from this link. The guide is also available through the members portal. portal.glasgow2024.org
(2) TL;DR WORLDCON PROGRAM. For comparison, Scott Edelman has scanned the Discon II (1974) program – all four pages of it. See it on Facebook.
(3) SARAH J. MAAS BANNED IN UTAH SCHOOLS. “It’s official: These 13 books are now banned from all public schools in Utah” at the Salt Lake City Tribune. Six of the 13 titles were written by the same fantasy romance author, Sarah J. Maas. Another, Oryx & Crake, is by Margaret Atwood.
…The law, which went into effect July 1, requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material” — pornographic or otherwise indecent content, as defined by Utah code….
(4) HOMETOWN HERO. Texas Highways devotes a short sidebar to Austin-based horror novelist: “Author Gabino Iglesias Tackles Monsters and Myths”.
Following the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Rico was in ruins: 95% of the island was without power, half the population didn’t have tap water, and there was at least $90 billion in damage.
That catastrophic moment of grief and wreckage is the setting of Gabino Iglesias’ latest, House of Bone and Rain, the follow-up to 2022’s The Devil Takes You Home. The latter earned the Austin-based author a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel—the only Latino writer to achieve the horror genre’s highest honor—as well as a movie deal with Sony.
For House of Bone’s protagonist, Gabe, and his childhood friends, death is omnipresent in the wake of the storm. But after one of their mothers is gunned down at a club, they begin to look for answers in an even more dangerous world of drug kingpins, gang brutality, ghosts, and Lovecraftian monsters. Inspired by a tragedy that happened in the author’s own life prior to his move to Texas in 2008, the gothic coming-of-age tale induces emotional gravity as the characters navigate the loss of home and youth.
“The inciting incident with the mother getting shot, that actually happened to me and my friends,” Iglesias says. “I think I started formulating that story in my head in the summer of 1999—because when I actually sat down to write it, it was all there 20 years later.”…
(5) BBC SCRUBS ANOTHER WHO ITEM. “UK Stabbings Suspect Previously Appeared In Doctor Who Charity Advert” – Deadline has the story.
The BBC has removed a six-year-old Doctor Who charity advert from all its platforms, following the discovery that it starred the teenager who has been named as the suspect in this week’s Southport stabbings.
Axel Rudakubana, now aged 17, has been charged with three counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder following the attack in northern England on Monday July 29, in which three young girls died, and several were left critically injured in a multiple stabbing that occurred in a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
The Times newspaper reports that the 2018 video sees Rudakubana, then aged 11, emerge from the famous Tardis in a brown trench coat and tie, similar to clothes worn by the show’s former star David Tennant.
(6) HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION ELECTIONS. Members will vote in the 2024 Horror Writers Association Elections for Officers and Trustees between August 19 and August 25. There is only one announced candidate for the offices of President and Secretary. Five candidates will vie for three Trustee positions.
The elected officers shall hold their respective offices for terms of two years, beginning on November 1 and ending on October 31.
FOR PRESIDENT
- Angela Yuriko Smith
FOR SECRETARY
- Becky Spratford
FOR BOARD OF TRUSTEES
- Linda Addison
- Patrick Barb
- James Chambers
- Ellen Datlow
- Cynthia Pelayo
(7) INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER. In “The Word-Hoard: Clark Ashton Smith” at Muse from the Orb, Maya St. Clair shares a list of exotic words she learned by reading Smith’s fiction.
Clark Ashton Smith was a weird fiction writer and poet of the 30s, a multitalented storyteller-artist-sculptor-craftsman from northern California. Initially acclaimed as a local poet and wunderkind, his fantastic poetry and stories eventually found success in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines. Mostly an autodidact, Smith lived with his family in an out-of-the-way cabin and did not pursue more than a middle school education. Instead, he drew from inspirations — Baudelaire, Poe — and resources at hand — the Oxford Dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica — to create his trademark maximalist style. His work attracted the attention of a fellow “obscure companion in the realms of the macabre,” H.P. Lovecraft, and the two maintained a spirited correspondence until Lovecraft’s death. (Smith sent Lovecraft a carved dinosaur bone.)1 Robert E. Howard likewise thought that Smith was excellent, and wrote Smith that he would sacrifice a finger “for the ability to make words flame and burn as you do.”
(8) CHEATERS EVER PROSPER. Literary Hub asks, “Did You Know That Poetry Used to Be an Actual Olympic Sport?”. Truth! And did you know there was something shady about the first winners? Also truth!
At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe easily won the decathlon in the first modern version of the event. The grueling, ten-part feat was not the only addition to the burgeoning modern games. Other events that debuted at the 1912 Olympics included architecture, sculpture, painting, music… and literature.
… The artistic jury would “only consider subjects not previously published, exhibited or performed, and having some direct connection with sport.” The [1912] Stockholm literature competition had fewer than ten entrants, but included Marcel Boulenger, a French novelist who won a bronze medal in fencing (foil) at the 1900 Olympics, French Symbolist Paul Adam, and Swiss playwright René Morax. The gold was awarded to two Germans, Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach, for their work “Ode to Sport.” The jury was effusive in their commendations, calling the piece “far and away the winner,” because it “praises athletics in a form that is both literate and athletic.” The narrative ideas “are arranged, classified, and expressed in a series that is flawless in logic and harmony.”
Yet Hohrod and Eschbach never existed. They were pseudonyms for Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who had just won the very competition he organized….
(9) SOMETIMES THEY DO GET FURRY. The Guardian echoes the question “’Why are people always pointing the finger at furries?’: inside the wild world of the furry fandom”.
The first thing that hits you when you press through the revolving doors of the Hyatt Regency hotel and convention centre in Rosemont, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, is the wall of sound. A cacophony of laughter and karaoke, pumping bass and gleeful, shouting voices. The second is the odour. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, coffee, alcohol, baby powder and deodorant. But the other senses fade out when your eyes start to process what they’re seeing. Because the thing that makes entering this lobby so sensationally surreal – the kind of experience you usually have to lick rare Amazonian frogs to achieve – is what people are wearing. In December 2023, I attended the Hyatt Regency for a convention called Midwest FurFest. It’s a gathering, one of the biggest in the world, for an often-misunderstood community known as “furries”, which is why about half the crowd – and there are nearly 15,000 people here this weekend – are dressed head to toe in massive, flamboyantly colourful, furry animal costumes….
(10) MAVERICK KONG. Maverick Theater, a small 75-seat venue in Fullerton, CA will present King Kong as a stage play through August 25.
Back for its 5th year! An original Maverick Theater stage adaptation of the 1933 film by Merian C. Cooper. The play is based on the Delos W. Lovelace novel, which is the same storyline and dialogue from the original film with only minor changes and additions. The overall show will have a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek feel but all the characters will be played honest and as true to the original; even the man in the monkey suit.
The Maverick Theater’s special effects team known as “Maverick Light & Magic” will take on the beauty and the beast adventure using a live compositing* process of multiple video sources. Similar to the process Willis O’Brien used to create the original King Kong. Actors will be interacting with live rear screen projections to create the illusion of Kong.
(11) MISSION: OLYMPOSSIBLE. “Tom Cruise to rappel off Stade de France in Olympics closing ceremony” reports the Guardian.
He’s scaled the world’s tallest building, dangled mid-air from a plane, set records for holding his breath underwater and, when he broke his foot shooting a rooftop parkour scene, just kept on running.
Now Tom Cruise, the 62-year-old movie star committed to a relentless dice with death, will take on his most high-profile hair-raiser to date: rappelling 42 metres (137ft) from the roof of the Stade de France as part of the Olympic Games closing ceremony this month.
The live broadcast will then reportedly cut to prerecorded footage of Cruise zipping through the streets of Paris on a motorbike, then on to a plane bound for California, clutching the Olympic flag all the while.
When he arrives stateside, he disembarks the plane by chucking himself out of the window, before skydiving down to the Hollywood sign. He then passes the flag to assorted athletes, including a cyclist, skateboarder and volleyball player, as they relay it round Los Angeles – the host city for the next games in 2028.
Cruise has been shooting the new Mission: Impossible movie in London and Paris since the new year, and sightings of him speeding around the French capital earlier this summer had been credited to that production.
Likewise, residents of Los Angeles are now so accustomed to his fondness for near-lethal stunts that the sight of Cruise falling from a huge height on to on the Hollywood sign in March raised few eyebrows.
It is believed the actor himself approached the International Olympic Committee and suggested the show-stopping sequence himself, having previously helped carry the torch through LA as part of its relay en route to Athens in 2004….
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
August 3, 1904 – Clifford D. Simak. (Died 1988.)
By Paul Weimer: The rural science fiction writer.
A lot of the science fiction writers of his time and age were big city enthusiasts and wrote their science fiction presents and futures extolling the city and its virtues, be it on Earth or another planet, or even planetwide cities.
Clifford Simak was different, very different. Much of his science fiction and fantasy could be considered rural, or pastoral, and my reading of him always seemed to come back to those liminal spaces between the civilized world and the wilderness. Themes of self-reliance, and yet community with others living in that same sort of space. An essential paradox that describes rural life…and Simak’s fiction.
And of course, always, Dogs. Aside from the rural life and setting of many of his stories, dogs, sometimes normal, often superintelligent or sentient, pop up everywhere. The themes of what dogs mean to humans: intelligence, companionship, loyalty and fidelity, are themes that one can find in Simak’s work whether or not there is an actual dog in it.
There are many fine Simak stories and novels I’ve read and enjoyed, from the “Big Front Yard”, one of the best first contact alien stories out there, to the strange and surreal “Shakespeare’s Planet”, “The Goblin Reservation”, and many more. Way Station, with its immortal caretaker of a rest stop for interstellar tourists, is particularly fun.
The one Simak story that stands above the novels, novellas and others for me is “Desertion”, part of the City cycle of future history stories that he wrote. “Desertion” is the one set on Jupiter, as the commander of a base around Jupiter is confronted with the fact that everyone he has sent out onto Jupiter, transformed for the purpose into Jovians…has disappeared and never come back. Our protagonist, X, and his dog, eventually come face to face with the stunning truth of what happened to their comrades. It is powerfully moving, as is much of Simak’s work.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
- Brewster Rockit is unsafe in space.
- Pardon my Planet surprises with what was in second place.
- Rubes prefers the stoned version.
- Tom Gauld might be saying the opposite of “Death will not release you”.
(14) SHELL GAME. “Un oeuf is enough: have we had our fill of movie Easter eggs?” asks the Guardian. No, of course not, they were just kidding.
…Easter eggs, that is, those fan-centric surprises with which the modern blockbuster is sprinkled, or in this case cluttered.
They take many forms: unpublicised cameos, in-jokes that only franchise devotees would clock, surprise scenes stowed away in the end credits, abundant references to other movies, even allusions to controversies on the sets of other movies. The Easter eggs in Deadpool & Wolverine belong to all these categories and more. There are so many, in fact, that it’s tempting to ask: which came first, the movie or the eggs?
Whatever the style of Easter egg, the point is the same: to encourage, flatter and reward the deepest possible level of fan engagement and to keep completists coming back for more….
…Given the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, Easter eggs are likely to remain a staple item on the menu. “I grew up watching Wayne’s World, which operated on much the same lines,” says [film critic] McCahill. “But I fear, after Deadpool & Wolverine, every big Hollywood movie is now just going to be a series of meme-able moments. Directors should be storytellers, not winkers. And as with their chocolate equivalents, Easter eggs should be consumed in moderation.”
(15) SOUNDS LIKE THE BOSS. “Hank Azaria, voice from the Simpsons, fronts a Bruce Springsteen cover band” is interviewed by NPR’s Weekend Edition.
SCOTT SIMON: But that’s really Hank Azaria, the voice behind many characters from the long-running “Simpsons” – also the pharaoh in “Night At The Museum” and Jim Brockmire, the plaid-clad sports announcer. And he’s now the presence behind Hank Azaria & The EZ Street Band, a Bruce Springsteen cover band that debuted this past week at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. The six-time Emmy award-winning actor joins us now from New York. Thanks so much for being with us….
(16) WITH FRICKIN’ LASERS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “A $500 Open Source Tool Lets Anyone Hack Computer Chips With Lasers” according to WIRED.
IN MODERN MICROCHIPS, where some transistors have been shrunk to less than a 10th of the size of a Covid-19 virus, it doesn’t take much to mess with the minuscule electrical charges that serve as the 0s and 1s underpinning all computing. A few photons from a stray beam of light can be enough to knock those electrons out of place and glitch a computer’s programming. Or that same optical glitching can be achieved more purposefully—say, with a very precisely targeted and well timed blast from a laser. Now that physics-bending feat of computer exploitation is about to become available to far more hardware hackers than ever before.
At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas next week, Sam Beaumont and Larry “Patch” Trowell, both hackers at the security firm NetSPI, plan to present a new laser hacking device they’re calling the RayV Lite. Their tool, whose design and component list they plan to release open source, aims to let anyone achieve arcane laser-based tricks to reverse engineer chips, trigger their vulnerabilities, and expose their secrets—methods that have historically only been available to researchers inside of well-funded companies, academic labs, and government agencies….
…Their goal in creating and releasing the designs for that ultra-cheap chip-hacking gadget, they say, is to make clear that laser-based exploitation techniques (known as laser fault injection or laser logic state imaging) are far more possible than many hardware designers—including clients for whom Beaumont and Trowell sometimes perform security testing at NetSPI—believe them to be. By demonstrating how inexpensively those methods can now be pulled off, they hope to both put a new tool in the hands of DIY hackers and researchers worldwide, and to push hardware manufacturers to secure their products against an obscure but surprisingly practical form of hacking….
(17) WILL SPACEX BAIL OUT BOEING? Futurism voices strong opinions about this: “It’s Sounding Like Boeing’s Starliner May Have Completely Failed”.
It looks like NASA officials might be seeing the writing on the wall for the very troubled Boeing Starliner, which has marooned two astronauts up in space for almost two months due to technical issues.
An unnamed “informed” source told Ars Technica that there’s a greater than 50 percent probability that the stranded astronauts will end up leaving the International Space Station on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, with another unnamed person telling the news outlet that the scenario is highly likely.
NASA officials are more cagey about what’s happening on the record, a marked contrast from previous weeks when they expressed confidence in the Starliner’s ability to safely bring back the astronauts.
“NASA is evaluating all options for the return of agency astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from the International Space Station as safely as possible,” NASA spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars. “No decisions have been made and the agency will continue to provide updates on its planning.”…
… Many signs are now pointing towards SpaceX rescuing the stranded astronauts, according to Ars. These signs include the space agency giving more than a quarter million dollars to SpaceX for a “SPECIAL STUDY FOR EMERGENCY RESPONSE,” and SpaceX actively training for the likely situation of the company sending a Dragon capsule to the space station to bring the astronauts home.
If SpaceX does get the green light, expect the Starliner project to be shoved into the proverbial dumpster, according to Ars‘ analysis.
It would be a bad look all around, because it would mean the American government had funneled a total of $5.8 billion into malfunctioning junk.
If this scenario happens, with Starliner not deemed safe enough for human travel, we hope politicians and others investigate what went wrong, given that SpaceX has managed to build the immensely more reliable Dragon capsule at 50 percent less cost than Boeing’s spacecraft….
(18) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George has to deal with a lot of questions in “Superman II Pitch Meeting”.
Released in 1980, “Superman II” is a sequel to the super popular Superman I, and it was also followed by Superman III. They really nailed the numbers on these. Superman 2 continues the Man of Steel’s adventures as he battles Kryptonian villains including General Zod amidst the growing popularity of superhero films during the late 70s and early 80s. Superman II definitely raises some questions though. Like where did Marlon Brando go? Why didn’t Lex Luthor just shut his lights? Why are snake bites so painful? Why did Superman have to give up his powers and then get them back so easily? What was with that cellophane S? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to Superman II.
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon played “Password with Elmo and Cookie Monster”. Bird is the word…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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(16) A new hacking technique was just what we needed.
The Fifth-Million Pixel Fan”
(2) And we had a hell of a fun con at Discon II – not overprogrammed, time for all of us to be in person with each other…
(3) “objectively sensitive material” – I see, so when are they banning A Study In Scarlet, since Holmes (and his author) clearly dislike the Mormons?
(7) “… did not pursue more than a middle school education”… that was the middle of the Great Depression. He was probably needed to work. My father, around the same time, had to take a commercial course in high school (in Philly), because that’s what his parents needed him to do. (He should have been a professor of Political Science, but wound up a factory worker.)
Birthday – Way Station is the book that rings the bell for me.
(16) Of course, this all requires physical access to the chips themselves, inside the case…
(17) And when will Congress allow NASA to build their own ships, rather than wasting money by outsourcing?
Iceland tomorrow, and Glasgow Wed!
(3) Washington county is possibly the most right-wing county in Utah, with Davis not far behind. And now they get to dictate what Park City and Salt Lake schools can keep in their libraries. Remember when conservatives liked to say “the best government is the one closest to the people?”
(11) I’m not much of a Tom Cruise fan, but that’s pretty impressive for 62.
“Now every fan must plot and plan to file her ‘zine as best she can”
(2) The Sunday schedule has a gap between noon and midnight, so there must have been one more page to the convention program than what was shown. There’s no mention of the Hugo Awards event, so that must have been on the missing page.
RickL: yeah, that is when the Hugos were, though my memory is fuzzy, merging with a lot of other Worldcons.
The main thing I remember about the Discon II Hugo ceremony is that I accepted Dick Geis’ Hugo. 🙂
(5) Well, that’s awkward.
(9) Noise, odors–and sights I’d probably be a lot less discombobulated by, but honestly, as described (dangerous to trust the description, but if one does…), the noise alone would keep me far away.
(17) @mark–Government agencies are not set up to engage in the “design and construction” end of R&D. Any of them. Including the military. They’ve always paid R&D companies to build the equipment. Loathe Musk though I do, SpaceX Dragon ships are doing a fine job. Actual engineers are doing most of the decision-making there.
Unlike the penny-pinching suits at Boeng, with the result that the Starliner is a failure, and a lot more expensive.
MikeG: I think I had a costume for the Masquerade, and nearly had a second for a group – Paisha (yes, her) wanted me to be Riff-Raff. That costume never showed…
LisC: Voyagers? A lot of probes were built by NASA engineers. I personally know that my late ex was responsible for the stationkeeping and navigation for Chandra (she was a NASA engineer).
(16) This kind of “hacking“ has been available for a long time, but only using high priced lab-grade equipment. The breakthrough is doing it cheaply. Many more blackhats will be able to afford it now.
A large part of the point is to find out ways to bypass security checks or read protected firmware or find other way to attack a particular chipset. So, for instance, one could take the security system out of a car, decode how it works, and use that information to bypass security on other vehicles. Or, if you’re wearing a white hat, pass that kind of cracking information along to the manufacturer.
Speaking of both Easter eggs (item 14) and Clark Ashton Smith (item 7), there is a reference in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness to “the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton”.
Leavin’ on a jet plane for the UK later today. I’ve been feeling really terrible for missing the deadline for submitting my amendment to the WSFS constitution, but on the other hand, yikes. I’ll be at the Business Meeting a lot of the time, though I won’t be there on time on Thursday.
See you there!
So much for the right to read, Utah.
As for furries, the costumes are amazing and just look really hot to wear.
(17) mark, as Lis said, governments didn’t build things, they do the research and design for the things they, errr, well, covet. My words, not theirs.
The International Space Station, originally the Freedom Space Station before President Reagan renamed it bless him, had in the NASA contract twelve contractors responsible for “research, engineering, and mission integration services”.
That is not the companies that actually manufactured the parts that went into that Station which in one news story was estimated at over four hundred.
@Cat Eldridge
Other examples: my father did the design and stress analysis for the arm that allowed access to the Shuttle cargo bay when it was on the pad. He was working for a machinery/defense company at the time. (They sent it to the local university for the engineering professors to check. He got to do it because the younger guys couldn’t figure out how.)
My sister was working at a precision-optics place. They surfaced the glass for the Hubble fix, which is now in the Air & Space Museum. Their specialty is aspherical surfaces.
(9) That’s a really great article.
(7) @mark Hi — thanks for the comment. CAS was a teenager, and would have attended high school, during the 1910s. According to his biographer Scott Connors, Smith’s decision to self-educate was based on attending Placer County High School for a few days and deciding it wasn’t for him; the crowded environment seems to have been overwhelming.
CAS was already writing for the pulps when the Depression hit, but your comment raises an important point: we probably lost many potential writers, artists, and intellectuals who had the misfortune to come of age during the Depression. Your dad sounds like a really interesting person and thinker.
MSC – remember that most of the writers from the Golden Age, on into New Wave, did NOT have degrees in lit.
@mark–Yes, NASA scientists and engineers operate the equipment, which was designed to NASA specs.
NASA doesn’t do the detailed design, or the building, and never has.
Wishing everyone going to Glasgow safe travels and a great Worldcon!!
LisC – you mean like, was it Boeing or M-D who built the Mars orbiter, and mixed metric and English measurements, and it crashed?
Re the cartoons, I have a really squicky story that involves a peanut butter jar. Feel free to stop reading now,
I worked in a college biology lab for 30-some years. One day I was investigating an unused cabinet deep in the back of a storage area. It was full of mostly innocuous stuff nobody cared about (t-squares, old rubber tubing, and such). But there also was a human fetus in a jar of alcohol. How the hell did that end up there? I never found out. I decided against putting it on display in one of the human anatomy laboratories — as did presumably the people to whom it had originally been gifted. What I found perversely amusing was that it was in a Peter Pan peanut butter jar: it was the boy who never grew up.
@mark–
Lockheed Martin didn’t “mix up” the units. It was using the system we still weirdly call English or imperial, correctly.
JPL was using metric correctly.
And someone dropped the ball and didn’t convert from one to the other.
This has happened, as far as I can tell, one time in the history of the US space program.
The article I’m quoting from is here: <When NASA Lost a Spacecraft Due to a Metric Math Mistake
And BBC news readers were laughing their asses off about it and the stupid Americans while anticipating the triumphal landing of the ESA Mars lander Schiaparelli in October 2016. The Lander was a bit late checking in after its expected landing, but, hey, that happens…and while they waited, they kept charting about the stupid Americans and their screwup because Americans don’t know metric, and I gradually went from mildly annoyed but still interested in the Schiaparelli landing, to laughing quite callously at the BBC, as it became obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that Schiaparelli had crashed.
Eventually they conceded there might be a real problem.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the cras site on November 1, 2016. In May 2017, ESA concluded, according to this article, it crashed because incorrect attitude estimate plus subsequent radar readings caused its computer to conclude it was below ground and deploy its parachute early.
Note that the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter crashed in September 1999, and in October 2016, BBC news readers covering the ESA Schiaparelli Mars lander, still didn’t have anything better–or more recent failures by NASA–to chat about. That’s because while Mars is quite difficult to land on or establish a good orbit around (being neither airless, nor provided with enough atmosphere to be used for good braking), NASA has the best success rate at doing so.
Every single space agency has its embarrassing failures. NASA has a lower percentage than the others, especially when it comes to Mars.
And I loathe Musk, but at SpaceX, he’s letting the engineers engineer, for the most part. It’s probably going to be a Crew Dragon that brings the Boeing astronauts home, because they actually work.
Boeing in fact has had a good history of building things for NASA–in the past. When they were still run by engineers.
@Lis Carey
“NASA doesn’t do the detailed design, or the building, and never has.”
As a blanket statement, this is not true. Some items are built by contractors, some by government, and some jointly. For example, the contract for the first stage of the Saturn V was awarded to Boeing, but the first 5 examples (3 ground test and 2 flight test) were built by government scientists and engineers at Redstone Arsenal/Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
A decade earlier, the Army’s Guided Missile Center (predecessor to MSFC) did the design and fabrication of many of the early Redstone rockets (a variant of Redstone put Alan Shepard into space) . They also built the static test stand on which the Redstone was developed.
My wife designs hardware for the International Space Station at Marshall, and some of the experiments and racks that go up are designed/fabricated by contractors, and some are built in-house at Marshall. She personally has to occasionally hand off (electronic) blueprints to NASA machinists and other technicians who build the hardware for delivery up to the ISS.