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. Since 2022, however, Boeing’s defense and space division has stumbled too, losing $6 billion — slightly more than the airplane side of the company in the same period.
“We have a couple of fixed-price development programs we have to just finish and never do them again,” then-CEO David Calhoun said last year. “Never do them again.”to build a vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station after the retirement of space shuttles, along with a $2.6 billion contract to SpaceX.
The company said in a regulatory filing that the latest hitch with Starliner caused a $125 million loss through June 30, which pushed cumulative cost overruns on the program to more than $1.5 billion. “Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods,” Boeing said. “They are transitioning from perhaps the worst executive leadership to some of the best,” Aboulafia said. “Given the regime change underway, I think people are going to give them some slack.”
United States United States Latest News, United States United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: wjxt4 - 🏆 246. / 63 Read more »
Source: ksatnews - 🏆 442. / 53 Read more »