NASA’s announcement Saturday that it won’t use a troubled Boeing capsule to return two stranded astronauts to Earth is a yet another setback for the struggling company, although the financial damage is likely to be less than the reputational harm.
The space capsule program represents a tiny fraction of Boeing’s revenue, but carrying astronauts is a high-profile job — like Boeing’s work building Air Force One presidential jets.NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing’s new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space“The whole thing is another black eye” for Boeing, aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia said. “It’s going to sting a little longer, but nothing they haven’t dealt with before.
The results have been dragged down by several fixed-price contracts for NASA and the Pentagon, including a deal to build new Air Force One presidential jets. Boeing has found itself on the hook as costs for those projects have risen far beyond the company’s estimates. Boeing, with more than a century of building airplane and decades as a NASA contractor, was seen as the favorite. But Starliner suffered technical setbacks that caused it to cancel some test launches, fall behind schedule and go over budget. SpaceX won the race to ferry astronauts to the ISS, which it accomplished in 2020.
Aboulafia said Starliner’s impact on Boeing business and finances will be modest — “not really a needle-mover.” Even the $4.2 billion, multi-year NASA contract is a relatively small chunk of revenue for Boeing, which reported sales of $78 billion last year.