Ryan Erik King
Mon, October 28, 2024
Photo: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo (Getty Images)
Despite helping NASA first reach the Moon in 1969, Boeing could be tapping out of NASA’s upcoming return to the lunar surface and space entirely. The aerospace giant is considering selling its space division amid its struggles to get the Starliner certified to fly. The spacecraft’s fault-riddled crewed test flight stranded two astronauts in space into next year and scrapped its use in upcoming missions for the foreseeable future.
Boeing is juggling its space crisis with several others that are impacting its core commercial airliner business. In the aftermath of the 737 Max door plug blowout in January, Boeing’s production quality faced unprecedented scrutiny from federal regulators. The Department of Justice deemed that Boeing violated its 2021 settlement for the 737 Max’s two fatal crashes, forcing the planemaker to pay nearly $700 million. Boeing was also forced to spend $4.7 billion in July to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, a vital 737 Max contractor once part of the manufacturer.
The Boeing Starliner cost the company $250 million last quarter, adding to $1.8 billion in program overruns, according to Simple Flying. These losses are compounded by over 33,000 Boeing machinists going on strike for more reasonable compensation. The ongoing strike began in September and halted production on 737, 767 and 777 planes, costing Boeing billions.
With the catastrophic condition of Boeing, Dave Calhoun stepped down as the company’s CEO in August. Kelly Ortberg is now at the helm with the task of fixing basically everything. He told the Wall Street Journal that he’s willing to sell off as much of Boeing as possible to right the ship:
Ortberg, who took over as Boeing CEO in August, said he was weighing asset sales and looking to jettison problematic programs. Beyond the core commercial and defense businesses, he said, most everything is on the table.
“We’re better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” Ortberg said in a call this week with analysts. “What do we want this company to look like five and 10 years from now? And do these things add value to the company or distract us?”
Ortberg also confirmed that Boeing is in discussions with Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ private space company, for a potential sale of its space division. Both companies are NASA contractors for the Artemis program and collaborate with rocket development. The sale would make Blue Origin a more competitive rival to SpaceX overnight. It would also mark the end of Boeing’s legacy in space, from being a vital Apollo program partner to building the American core of the International Space Station.
Boeing Is Losing a Staggering Amount of Money on Its Dismal Starliner Failure
Victor Tangermann
Fri, October 25, 2024
Imcoster Syndrome
Embattled aerospace giant Boeing is in even bigger trouble after its plagued Starliner spacecraft left two NASA astronauts stranded earlier this year.
The project's costs have continued to spiral over six weeks after the capsule returned to Earth without any astronauts on board. As SpaceNews reports, Boeing took a massive $250 million hit on the Starliner program in its third-quarter earnings, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That's in addition to a $125 million write-off related to Starliner in the company's second fiscal quarter this year.
The total cost of the failed commercial crew program has ballooned to around $1.85 billion, a stunning sum considering the company has been working on the spacecraft for over a decade and has yet to successfully deliver and then return astronauts to the space station.
The project, which is directly competing with SpaceX's far more successful Crew Dragon spacecraft, is on thin ice, and Boeing has remained suspiciously vague about its future.
"We’ve got some tough contracts and there’s no magic bullet for that," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took over the reins in August, told investors during a recent earnings call, as quoted by SpaceNews. "We’re going to have to work our way through some of those tough contracts."
Contracted
Ortberg, however, appeared defiant that Boeing will continue working on its much-maligned Starliner, saying that walking away from the project isn't a "viable option for us."
"Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we can walk away from these contracts," he told investors, caveating a possible scenario where a given program goes from one phase of a contract to another.
It's far from just Starliner that Boeing has to worry about. The company has plenty of other major fires to put out these days, including a commercial jet business in crisis and a massive industrial worker strike.
Overall, the company's quarterly losses have surged to $6 billion, with Ortberg promising a "fundamental culture change."
"This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again," he told investors, as quoted by Reuters.
Where that leaves the future of Starliner remains unclear at best. Earlier this month, NASA announced it would make use of SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two upcoming crew rotation missions to the space station, the latter of which was originally scheduled to make use of Starliner.
"Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense are going to stay with The Boeing Company in the long run," Ortberg said, "but there’s probably some things on the fringe that we can be more efficient with or that just distract us from our main goals."
More on Starliner: NASA Abandons Boeing's Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station
Victor Tangermann
Fri, October 25, 2024
Imcoster Syndrome
Embattled aerospace giant Boeing is in even bigger trouble after its plagued Starliner spacecraft left two NASA astronauts stranded earlier this year.
The project's costs have continued to spiral over six weeks after the capsule returned to Earth without any astronauts on board. As SpaceNews reports, Boeing took a massive $250 million hit on the Starliner program in its third-quarter earnings, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That's in addition to a $125 million write-off related to Starliner in the company's second fiscal quarter this year.
The total cost of the failed commercial crew program has ballooned to around $1.85 billion, a stunning sum considering the company has been working on the spacecraft for over a decade and has yet to successfully deliver and then return astronauts to the space station.
The project, which is directly competing with SpaceX's far more successful Crew Dragon spacecraft, is on thin ice, and Boeing has remained suspiciously vague about its future.
"We’ve got some tough contracts and there’s no magic bullet for that," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took over the reins in August, told investors during a recent earnings call, as quoted by SpaceNews. "We’re going to have to work our way through some of those tough contracts."
Contracted
Ortberg, however, appeared defiant that Boeing will continue working on its much-maligned Starliner, saying that walking away from the project isn't a "viable option for us."
"Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we can walk away from these contracts," he told investors, caveating a possible scenario where a given program goes from one phase of a contract to another.
It's far from just Starliner that Boeing has to worry about. The company has plenty of other major fires to put out these days, including a commercial jet business in crisis and a massive industrial worker strike.
Overall, the company's quarterly losses have surged to $6 billion, with Ortberg promising a "fundamental culture change."
"This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again," he told investors, as quoted by Reuters.
Where that leaves the future of Starliner remains unclear at best. Earlier this month, NASA announced it would make use of SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two upcoming crew rotation missions to the space station, the latter of which was originally scheduled to make use of Starliner.
"Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense are going to stay with The Boeing Company in the long run," Ortberg said, "but there’s probably some things on the fringe that we can be more efficient with or that just distract us from our main goals."
More on Starliner: NASA Abandons Boeing's Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station
Boeing considers selling its space business, including Starliner: report
Elizabeth Howell
Mon, October 28, 2024
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the Harmony module’s forward port at the International Space Station. | Credit: NASA
Boeing may sell off its space business, including its Starliner program, amid large financial losses for the company, a media report suggests.
The discussions are said to be "at an early stage," according to an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal. The reported talks come less than two months after Starliner completed its first astronaut test flight on Sept. 6 by touching down in New Mexico autonomously, without its two crewmembers.
Boeing is known for decades of work with NASA, including being the prime contractor for the International Space Station. (The company continues engineering support services for ISS to this day.) But Boeing is facing mounting financial issues this year, including a protracted strike by its largest labor union and significant deficits in the Starliner program.
The WSJ report emphasizes, however, that discussions about selling the company's space business — spurred by Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s new chief executive officer, who was appointed Aug. 8 — are "at an early stage."
And it's uncertain how much of the business may be sold, if a sale happens at all. For example, Boeing may keep its role in leading the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for NASA's Artemis program of moon exploration, the WSJ report noted. The SLS successfully launched the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to lunar orbit in 2022 and will launch astronauts around the moon as soon as 2025, with Artemis 2.
Boeing also has a 50% stake, along with Lockheed Martin, in United Launch Alliance, a national security focused-launch provider whose Atlas V rocket launched the Starliner mission on June 5. Lockheed and Boeing have reportedly been looking to sell ULA, as the joint venture moves into launches with a next-generation rocket known as Vulcan Centaur. Vulcan completed its second-ever launch on Oct. 2.
Starliner's development has resulted in financial losses for Boeing. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 23, for example, Boeing reported a $250 million charge in the third quarter of its fiscal year "primarily to reflect schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs" for Starliner. Boeing's second-quarter results showed an additional $125 million loss on the program.
The spacecraft is a small part of Boeing's defense, space and security business, which reported $3.1 billion in losses (against $18.5 billion in revenues) in the first nine months of 2024, according to Boeing's Q3 results. Boeing's head of the division, Ted Colbert, was removed in September, according to multiple media outlets, including the Associated Press.
a rocket blasting off with blue sky behind
Starliner received the lion's share of Boeing coverage in space circles this year, however, following its Starliner astronaut test flight. As a developmental ISS mission, issues were expected, and schedules were not necessarily set in stone.
That said, propulsion problems during the capsule's journey to the ISS surprised the team, given that Starliner's engineers had already addressed thruster issues that cropped up during uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022. Five out of 28 thrusters in Starliner's reaction control system for in-space maneuvers failed on the recent astronaut mission, which was known as Crew Flight Test (CFT).
Starliner managed to dock successfully to the ISS on June 6 despite the thruster problems. Boeing and NASA examined the thruster issues for nearly two months and repeatedly delayed Starliner's departure from the ISS. But they could not find the root cause and remedy, and NASA ultimately decided that bringing the astronauts back to Earth on Starliner was too much of a risk.
The two astronauts assigned to Starliner, former U.S. Navy test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, saw their expected 10-day mission extended to at least eight months as their spacecraft departed. They are now expected to return home in February 2025 aboard the other commercial craft used by NASA, SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
NASA awarded both SpaceX and Boeing multi-billion dollar contracts in 2014 to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. Crew Dragon was based on the successful cargo Dragon craft that first flew to space in 2012, while Starliner is a completely new spacecraft. Crew Dragon has now launched on nine operational astronaut missions to the ISS for NASA since its 2020 crewed test flight.
Starliner was supposed to fly its first operational mission, known as Starliner-1, in 2025 with three astronauts on board. Recently, however, Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the agency is still determining next steps after the troubled test flight.
"We're just starting that — just trying to understand how to correct and rectify the issues that are on the table," Jones said on Oct. 25. "The schedules associated with how long, and what will be required in that area, [are] in front of us, and we'll be working hard on that to know."
Mon, October 28, 2024
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the Harmony module’s forward port at the International Space Station. | Credit: NASA
Boeing may sell off its space business, including its Starliner program, amid large financial losses for the company, a media report suggests.
The discussions are said to be "at an early stage," according to an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal. The reported talks come less than two months after Starliner completed its first astronaut test flight on Sept. 6 by touching down in New Mexico autonomously, without its two crewmembers.
Boeing is known for decades of work with NASA, including being the prime contractor for the International Space Station. (The company continues engineering support services for ISS to this day.) But Boeing is facing mounting financial issues this year, including a protracted strike by its largest labor union and significant deficits in the Starliner program.
The WSJ report emphasizes, however, that discussions about selling the company's space business — spurred by Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s new chief executive officer, who was appointed Aug. 8 — are "at an early stage."
And it's uncertain how much of the business may be sold, if a sale happens at all. For example, Boeing may keep its role in leading the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for NASA's Artemis program of moon exploration, the WSJ report noted. The SLS successfully launched the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to lunar orbit in 2022 and will launch astronauts around the moon as soon as 2025, with Artemis 2.
Boeing also has a 50% stake, along with Lockheed Martin, in United Launch Alliance, a national security focused-launch provider whose Atlas V rocket launched the Starliner mission on June 5. Lockheed and Boeing have reportedly been looking to sell ULA, as the joint venture moves into launches with a next-generation rocket known as Vulcan Centaur. Vulcan completed its second-ever launch on Oct. 2.
Starliner's development has resulted in financial losses for Boeing. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 23, for example, Boeing reported a $250 million charge in the third quarter of its fiscal year "primarily to reflect schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs" for Starliner. Boeing's second-quarter results showed an additional $125 million loss on the program.
The spacecraft is a small part of Boeing's defense, space and security business, which reported $3.1 billion in losses (against $18.5 billion in revenues) in the first nine months of 2024, according to Boeing's Q3 results. Boeing's head of the division, Ted Colbert, was removed in September, according to multiple media outlets, including the Associated Press.
a rocket blasting off with blue sky behind
Starliner received the lion's share of Boeing coverage in space circles this year, however, following its Starliner astronaut test flight. As a developmental ISS mission, issues were expected, and schedules were not necessarily set in stone.
That said, propulsion problems during the capsule's journey to the ISS surprised the team, given that Starliner's engineers had already addressed thruster issues that cropped up during uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022. Five out of 28 thrusters in Starliner's reaction control system for in-space maneuvers failed on the recent astronaut mission, which was known as Crew Flight Test (CFT).
Starliner managed to dock successfully to the ISS on June 6 despite the thruster problems. Boeing and NASA examined the thruster issues for nearly two months and repeatedly delayed Starliner's departure from the ISS. But they could not find the root cause and remedy, and NASA ultimately decided that bringing the astronauts back to Earth on Starliner was too much of a risk.
The two astronauts assigned to Starliner, former U.S. Navy test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, saw their expected 10-day mission extended to at least eight months as their spacecraft departed. They are now expected to return home in February 2025 aboard the other commercial craft used by NASA, SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
NASA awarded both SpaceX and Boeing multi-billion dollar contracts in 2014 to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. Crew Dragon was based on the successful cargo Dragon craft that first flew to space in 2012, while Starliner is a completely new spacecraft. Crew Dragon has now launched on nine operational astronaut missions to the ISS for NASA since its 2020 crewed test flight.
Starliner was supposed to fly its first operational mission, known as Starliner-1, in 2025 with three astronauts on board. Recently, however, Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the agency is still determining next steps after the troubled test flight.
"We're just starting that — just trying to understand how to correct and rectify the issues that are on the table," Jones said on Oct. 25. "The schedules associated with how long, and what will be required in that area, [are] in front of us, and we'll be working hard on that to know."
