WASHINGTON — The chief executive of Boeing says his company remains to be committed to the CST-100 Starliner industrial crew vehicle despite the most recent problems which have further delayed this system.
In an interview on the “Check 6” podcast by Aviation Week published June 16, Dave Calhoun said that Boeing was not “shutting the door” on Starliner after the corporate postponed the primary crewed flight of the vehicle that had been scheduled for late July.
“We’re going to do whatever NASA asks us to do,” he said when asked in regards to the program at the tip of the podcast. “We do imagine in it, and we imagine there needs to be a couple of player.”
NASA is currently counting on its other industrial crew partner, SpaceX, to move astronauts to and from the International Space Station on its Crew Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX has conducted 10 crewed launches over three years, seven for NASA and three fully industrial ones, including the Ax-2 flight to the station in May.
Boeing had been preparing from its Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the primary flight of Starliner with astronauts on board, when it announced June 1 that it was postponing the launch. Recent reviews found issues with parts of the spacecraft’s parachute system in addition to tape utilized in wire harnesses that’s flammable.
In that briefing, Mark Nappi, vice chairman and program manager for CST-100 Starliner at Boeing, appeared to boost questions on the long run of the general Starliner effort, saying the corporate had been talking internally “in regards to the way forward for Starliner and the way we’re going to maneuver forward.” He later clarified that meant long-term evaluations about constructing one other spacecraft and shifting from the Atlas 5. There had not been “serious discussions” about terminating this system, he added.
“We now have definitely fallen behind in it,” Calhoun acknowledged within the podcast about Boeing’s work on Starliner in comparison with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. “Technically, we expect we all know what we’re doing. I feel ultimately with every next successful launch, we’ll exhibit that.”
Neither NASA nor Boeing has provided an update on either the parachute or tape issues because the June 1 announcement. At the moment, Nappi said he wouldn’t comment on how long the CFT mission could be delayed “until we spend the following several days understanding what we’d like to go do.”
At a June 8 Space Transportation Association event here, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said those reviews were still ongoing. “We’re trying to seek out the very best opportunity,” he said, suggesting on the time it might take an extra one to 2 weeks. “We would like to make sure that Starliner launches when it’s ready.”
Each Bowersox and Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center, said a rescheduled launch for the CFT mission would depend not only on the vehicle’s readiness but additionally the general launch manifest. “Because there’s such a heavy manifest, it all the time becomes a discussion between the assorted NASA programs and between the Space Force and their missions as to when we will fit it in,” she said.
Boeing has not disclosed what additional costs it would incur from this latest delay. The corporate has recorded nearly $900 million in charges against earnings for this system from past problems and delays, raising questions on whether Starliner will ever break even.
“We’re not shutting the door on it in any way, shape or form,” Calhoun said of Starliner. “We intend to do it — earn a living on it — but we’re going to let the market and our customer let that play out, and we’ll see what happens.”
He appeared to deemphasize that a part of Boeing’s overall space portfolio, highlighting as a substitute its work on the Space Launch System and various defense program. “Low Earth orbit and constructing out an enormous presence in that world shouldn’t be going to be our primary focus,” he said. Boeing is one in all the partners on Orbital Reef, a industrial space station project led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space.