Boeing had big plans for its new space capsule, even before it won a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to develop a spacecraft for NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. If space were indeed going to open to the masses, as many at the time were predicting, Boeing wanted to position itself as the premier spacecraft provider, the way it had with commercial airliners.
Nearly a decade later, those dreams have crumbled. Not a single person has flown Boeing’s spacecraft to space. No one has booked a private flight. The company has had to absorb about $1.4 billion in cost overruns, and NASA’s safety advisers have called for an independent review of the program. Meanwhile, SpaceX, which received a contract at the same time Boeing did, but for nearly 40 percent less money, has flown eight missions to the ISS for NASA, as well as additional private astronaut crews.
What went wrong? How could one of the world’s most legendary aerospace companies fail so miserably in its race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and still be on the ground when its competitor has been launching astronauts to the space station since 2020? One top NASA official called Boeing’s inability to get its CST-100 Starliner capsule into regular use an “existential” challenge.
Bad management. There’s a lot of talk about the economics, and the difficulty of shifting from a cost-plus environment, but the bottom line is, they built a lousy spacecraft.
Plus, give NASA a little credit here: “NASA purposefully awarded two contracts in case one provider faltered, and the value of that strategy is now evident. If SpaceX had not been successful, NASA would still be relying on Russia to get its astronauts to the space station, as it did during the years after the space shuttle was retired and SpaceX started flying.”