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SpaceX and Boeing Slated For Manned Space Missions By Year's End (fortune.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Fortune, covering NASA's announcement last week that it expects SpaceX to conduct a crewed test flight by the end of the year: SpaceX's crewed test flight is slated for December, after an uncrewed flight in August. Boeing will also be demonstrating its CST-100 Starliner capsule, with a crewed flight in November following an uncrewed flight in August. NASA's goal is to launch crews to the ISS from U.S. soil, a task that has fallen to Russia's space program since the retirement of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in 2011. NASA began looking for private launch companies to take over starting in 2010, and contracted both SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to pursue crewed launches. The push to restore America's crewed spaceflight capacity has been delayed in part, according to a detailed survey by Ars Technica, by Congress redirecting funds in subsequent years. The test flights could determine whether Boeing or SpaceX conducts the first U.S. commercial space launch to the ISS. Whichever company gets that honor may also claim a symbolic U.S. flag stuck to a hatch on the space station. Sources speaking to Ars describe the race between the two companies as too close to call, and say that a push to early 2019 is entirely possible. But in an apparent vote of confidence, NASA has already begun naming astronauts to helm the flights.
Not really good practice. The trip to the ISS is very short, a matter of hours (although the Soyuz in some orbital profiles had to take a little longer). The journey to Mars is on the order of months. The Dragon is also much, much smaller, and since the Red Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Red_Dragon has been canceled, there's not even a benefit from that. All of that said, I do agree that where spaceflight is concerned we definitely live in exciting times.
Even if Boeing (who has the knowledge and a successful track record) builds the capsule, fact is SpaceX has yet to have a single fully successful mission (they always had a major problem) and has a track record of ignoring problems.
Ok. There's so much wrong here, I'm not sure where to begin. First of all, Boeing and SpaceX have different capsule systems. Space X is using the Dragon 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 on top of a Falcon 9. Boeing is using the Starliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100_Starliner on top of an Atlas rocket. As for the idea hat SpaceX has yet to have a single successful mission, this is demonstrably not true as a glance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches where for example you can see 17 successful launches in 2017 alone. While SpaceX has had some very high profile failures, there success rate at this point is close comparable to other major rocket companies, and the Dragon spacecraft has also successfully returned to Earth. Moreover, one of the major things that people think of a as a "failure" of SpaceX is when one of their rocket's first stages doesn't land successfully. In fact, that didn't happen at all in 2017, and moreover isn't an issue anyways because it isn't an issue for mission success, simply an issue for if they have a rocket available for cheap reuse later.
I suppose one could point to the rumors of failure of Zuma, but it is pretty clear that if anything failed there it was on the Northrop-Grumman payload end, not SpaceX, as demonstrated by the fact that SpaceX did not halt flights after the Zuma launch.
All of that said, there are some signs that SpaceX has been too fast and loose with some safety issues. A recent set of government audits found serious safety and protocol issues at pretty much all the major space contractors but with more issues at SpaceX than any of the others https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/top-u-s-space-contractors-cited-for-lapses-by-pentagon-watchdog. However, none of those issues have so far translated into any substantial problem.
Meanwhile other rockets such as the Delta are at 100% success rate.
So, almost no one has a 100% success rate. Note by the way, that this is part of why both the Dragon and Starliner(the Boeing capsule) have an ability for the capsule to separate if there's an issue with the rocket. It is interesting that you mention the Delta, since around 9% of Deltas have failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)#Launch_reliability. Last I checked, 91% is not 100%. (Granted, many of the failures were early Deltas and many of those failures were partial failures where people in a capsule above might survive). But, in fact, NASA doesn't think that man-rating any version of the Delta makes sense https://www.wired.com/2008/07/why-nasa-isnt-t/, whereas NASA is in favor of man-rating the Falcon 9, Block 5, so the people who think about this sort of thing have thought very carefully about this. Part of why NASA won't man-rate the Delta is because its regular flight profile subjects payloads to 6 gs, but a major part is also its lack of redundant systems where adding them in would require massive work.
NASA is insisting, quite appropriately on at least a few Falcon 9 Block 5 flights before they put people on it. The Block 5 is going to be the final version of the rocket and has a lot of tweaks which will make reuse easier but also other bits that will improve safety and reliability.