After enduring the months of embarrassment that constituted Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test – which ended, for Starliner, at least, with an uncrewed landing back in September – Boeing officials reportedly aren’t feeling as rosy about their entry for a NASA-approved commercial spacecraft.
In fact, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is reportedly considering offloading Starliner, the projects that support the International Space Station, and most of the beleaguered company’s space division, according to the Wall Street Journal. Company representatives even nosed around Blue Origin to see if Jeff Bezos’ rocket company might be interested, the WSJ reported.
Although Boeing has yet to confirm or deny that Starliner and other pieces of its space division could be sold off, the fact that they might be can’t exactly come as a shock.
Boeing’s Starliner was already years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget when it finally made it to a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center last May. Then, after repeated scrubs, the commercial spacecraft that was meant to tote astronauts back and forth to the ISS in place of the space shuttle finally lifted off in June, a month after the first launch attempt, with astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore aboard.
The pair reached the ISS, but the reports of helium leaks and thrusters that didn’t fire translated to delaying their return flight by days, weeks and months before NASA officials scrapped that plan entirely. Ultimately, Williams, the mission pilot, and Wilmore, the mission commander, found themselves stranded in space until February when they’re slated to hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s Dragon 9.
On top of the spacecraft’s less-than-stellar performance, last week’s earnings report also revealed that the program burned through another $250 million in the last quarter alone, taking its grand total of cost overruns to more than $1.8 billion. Paired with Boeing’s current reality as a company that is dealing with fallout from a door blowing off back in January during an Alaska Airlines flight, a fraud allegation over the 2019 737 Max plane crashes, a messy employee strike, among other quagmires, all while hemorrhaging money, trying to sell off Starliner and other ISS support components seems like the obvious answer.
Although Ortberg hasn’t said anything publicly about Starliner’s future with Boeing, he hinted that changes were coming during last Wednesday’s earnings call.
“We’re better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” Ortberg, who has only been in the pilot’s seat since August, said. Continuing, Ortberg took pains to make it clear that neither the commercial airplane program nor the defense systems were on the chopping block, but there were no such assurances for Starliner.
Meanwhile, in the nearly two months since Starliner returned home, sans astronauts, NASA and Boeing engineers are still working on understanding what caused Starliner’s multiple issues, NASA officials stated on Friday.
Although Starliner was slated to fly about six missions for NASA before 2030, the federal space agency officials made it clear that Starliner’s future is currently, well, unclear. “We’re just starting that, just trying to understand how to correct and rectify the issues that are on the table,” Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA’s commercial crew program said, noting that they won’t have any clarity on where Boeing Starliner goes from here for a long while yet.
In the meantime we’ll just have to wait and see whether Boeing actually puts Starliner up for sale—and whether anyone else will actually buy it.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
