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Boeing had big plans for its new space capsule even before the company won a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to develop a spacecraft for NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. If space did open up to the masses, as many had predicted at the time, Boeing wanted to position itself as a spacecraft leader. as was the case with commercial aircraft.
Almost a decade later, those dreams have shattered. Not a single person flew into space on Boeing’s spacecraft. Nobody booked a private flight. The company faced about $1.4 billion in cost overruns, and NASA safety advisers called for an independent review of the program. Meanwhile, SpaceX, which received a contract at the same time as Boeing but for almost 40 percent less money, has flown eight missions to the ISS for NASA as well as additional private astronaut teams.
What went wrong? How could one of the world’s most legendary aerospace companies fail so miserably in the race against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and still be grounded when its competitor has been sending astronauts to the space station since 2020? A senior NASA official called Boeing’s inability to regularly operate its CST-100 Starliner capsule an “existential” challenge.
Some NASA officials believe one cause may lie in the way the commercial crew program was set up – a fixed-price contract after years of cost-margins that allowed contractors to cover any excess costs they incurred in developing the project created to pass on to NASA.
“This commercial model is not exactly the same structure as Boeing,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in an interview. “So they had to work through that and make sure they resourced that, and that, as you know, is difficult. You have to put a lot of skin into the game. That’s not the way they were structured to begin with.”
But NASA, which desperately wants Boeing to begin flying so it doesn’t have to rely solely on SpaceX, is reluctant to criticize Boeing.
“They were great partners,” Melroy said. “They are committed. They realize it’s existential.”
John Shannon, who was named in December vice president of Boeing Exploration Systems, which oversees Starliner and the company’s space programs, said in an interview that despite the huge costs, the company would not abandon the program – although he acknowledged that The $1.4 billion that Boeing had to spend on the program presented a major hurdle.
“You just never see that kind of investment for a government contract like this,” he said. “And if I try to look at it at the highest level, I think it’s important for the country to have the American ability to fly crew members. SpaceX is doing that now. We’ll be second.”
When asked whether Boeing plans to continue the program long-term, he said that is questionable. “That’s a great question. And I wish I had the answer to that right away,” he said.
The concern, he said, is that the private space market is uncertain and plans for commercial space stations that would require regular launches have not yet been implemented, although NASA has begun investing in them and Boeing is a partner with Blue Origin and Sierra Space on one.
“They just haven’t matured to the point where I can plug them into any kind of business case and say, yeah, this is something that’s going to kind of get us over the hump,” he said.
He added: “Probably the biggest challenge for me is defining how to make this a positive business case given the market conditions we are currently seeing.”
However, SpaceX appears to have argued that successful flying can be good business. Since the original NASA contract, an additional contract for five additional missions to the space station has been won, valued at more than $1.4 billion. There was also a purely private flight into orbit financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who chartered three other flights. SpaceX has also flown civilians to the ISS as part of missions chartered by Axiom, a Houston-based company.
Regardless of market conditions, however, many of Boeing’s problems are self-inflicted.
Over the years, the program has faced repeated delays and technical challenges, ranging from serious software errors to corroded valves. Earlier this year, Boeing again delayed its hoped-for July launch when it discovered problems with the design of the capsule’s parachute system and discovered that the tape inside the plane was flammable.
The flight is now planned for next year at the earliest. For Boeing, putting Starliner into service is now about more than just flying — it’s about whether the company can be trusted to carry out programs critical to the national interest.
The Starliner program had problems from the start.
To consolidate some of its key aerospace programs, Boeing created a new division in 2015 to oversee their development from concept to reality. Led by a senior executive, it brought together engineers from across the company, from commercial aviation to defense to aerospace, to “bring Boeing’s technical expertise, development program best practices, and program management and integration to our most important businesses more effectively.” “Apply development activities,” the company said in a statement at the time.
Suddenly, the KC-46 aerial refueling aircraft that the company was building for the Pentagon was lumped in with the 777X airliner and the Space Launch System rocket and Starliner spacecraft it was developing for NASA. But instead of increasing efficiency, it has created problems, say industry officials familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly. The commercial aircraft that were designed to roll off the assembly line at a certain frequency had little in common with military aircraft designed for combat, and even less with missiles and spacecraft that were built at a far slower frequency.
In a briefing in June, Mark Nappi, the third Boeing executive to lead the Starliner program, said some of the spacecraft’s problems stemmed from its early development days.
“It may be questionable – should we notice such things so late?” he said. “And that could be because there was some optimism around the completion of some of the designs. Some of the processes were created many years ago. And they caused some of these things to kind of creep through the system.”
Shannon rejected the idea that combining different programs into one department was a mistake. Under the department, the programs could “work out all of our technical timelines to make sure we don’t run into each other,” he said. “And if we were separated in our individual departments and tried to do it separately, we wouldn’t have had that communication. We are also able to acquire technical talent and redeploy them between programs as needed.”
Nevertheless, the problems with Starliner quickly mounted.
A fuel leak occurred during a test of the Starliner’s demolition engines in 2018. The following year, in a test, only two of the three main parachutes were deployed because workers simply could not attach one of the smaller lead parachutes to the main parachute.
The problems only continued – a list of serious errors and mishaps that intensified as the company also struggled with the aftermath of the 737 Max disaster, two plane crashes within five months in 2018 and 2019 that left 346 in total people were killed.
In December 2019, Starliner was successfully launched into orbit during a test flight without astronauts on board. But once the Starliner was on its own, it began behaving erratically, forcing ground controllers into disarray. The problem: The spacecraft’s onboard computers were offline for eleven hours, meaning the spacecraft was executing commands for a completely different part of the mission. While dealing with this problem, ground controllers discovered another problem that they feared could cause a collision of the spacecraft’s service and crew modules during separation.
Afterward, NASA officials were unusually blunt about the severity of the problems.
“We could have lost the spacecraft twice during this mission,” said Douglas Loverro, who was then NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. “So it was a close call.”
Over the next year, Boeing set about fixing its software, combing through a million lines of code. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2021, it was said that they were ready to repeat the test flight to the space station without astronauts on board. By then, SpaceX had already flown three astronaut missions to the station. Boeing was desperate to catch up, but Starliner couldn’t leave the launch pad.
This time the culprit was not the software, but rather several stuck valves in the capsule’s service module. Another problem, another months-long delay. In May 2022, Boeing finally successfully flew the Starliner to the space station. It was able to dock, return home a few days later and land under parachutes in the New Mexico desert, but still without astronauts
Earlier this year, Boeing said it was finally ready to launch the Crewed Test Flight (CTF) with two NASA astronauts on board, Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the same mission SpaceX flew in 2020.
Then, in June, the company announced that it had discovered more problems, this time with the parachutes and flammable tape. It would have to resign again.
When Shannon was given oversight of Boeing’s space programs, including Starliner, he conducted a top-down review of the program.
“I could come in with a new set of eyes,” he said. “We came here to make sure we really understood the system from the start. Was the program well-founded? We carried out a really detailed technical review with the entire team.”
The result: “We actually didn’t find anything. I think the problems we’ve had, while frustrating, are related to trying to develop a system as complicated as a manned spacecraft.”
He said the company will not rush anything or compromise safety. “There is no responsibility more sacred than ensuring the safety of a space crew,” he said. “And that really drives a level of conservatism that I’m very careful to make sure I maintain constantly.”
NASA specifically awarded two contracts in case one bidder failed, and the value of this strategy is now apparent. If SpaceX had not been successful, NASA would still have to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to the space station, as it did in the years after the Space Shuttle was retired and SpaceX began flying.
The space agency “urgently needs a second provider to transport crew,” Steve Stich, head of NASA’s commercial crew program, told reporters in June. “Our ultimate goal is to operate one SpaceX and one Boeing flight per year to alternately bring our crews to the station. “That’s why we’re supporting Boeing and doing everything we can to investigate each of these issues and try to operate the flight as quickly as possible.”
Boeing was initially considered the favorite for dominance, even though Elon Musk’s fledgling company was already delivering cargo and supplies to the space station with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. But flying astronauts was an altogether more difficult task that many thought was better suited to a company like Boeing, which has a long history in space dating back to the Apollo era. And SpaceX also had problems. In 2015, one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded while flying supplies to the ISS. Then another exploded on the launch pad during an engine test in 2016.
But in 2020, SpaceX successfully flew a test mission with astronauts to the station. And the company has been flying crews ever since, both NASA astronauts and private individuals.
“It’s proud of it, and Boeing has a long history of human spaceflight programs,” said Todd Harrison, a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “If they gave up on Starliner, they would be saying goodbye to that story and basically leaving it to the new space companies.”