Calamity capsule: Boeing's Starliner losses approaching $1B

The Starliner losses just keep adding up for Boeing, whose troubled crew capsule spacecraft is closing in on $900 million in cumulative losses for the aerospace giant. Boeing's Q3 quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that it lost $195 million for the quarter, and $288 million for the year to …

[John Smith 19]

That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

And it turns out you're not.

The NASA contract they picked up is worth multii $Bn and their failure to deliver very damm much of anything is not very impressive.

The whole company looks like they've gone to s**t.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

So do they get a special NASA extra $1Bn payment for R&D into "testing procedures for spacecraft" or do they get a $1Bn black ops budget payment for a secret project so secret nobody can be told what it is.

Cos no way are any of our elected leaders letting Boeing getting into trouble.

[DS999]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

That's why their military contracts are always "cost plus" so they don't have to worry about losing money like they are with Starliner. Those contracts are much much larger, so that $1 billion loss is probably wiped out in a month's worth of a military contract's "plus".

[jgarbo]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

Seems like the accountants are still running the show, not the engineers.

[RegGuy1]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

What a good job Nasa chose two partners. It just goes to show diversification can work.

To be clear: well done SpaceX. :-)

[kmckaig]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

There's a long-held opinion of some in the American aerospace industry that Boeing began it's decline after their acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, I heard one person describe it thus,

"Boeing changed from an engineering company into a corporate finance company that occasionally spits out an airplane."

I'm paraphrasing here, but I don't think that's far from the mark considering their much more deadly and public failures of late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

If you have Netflix, watch this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boeing

Multiple Boeing staff talk about the problems that started after the acquisition and how the corporate culture changed from engineering/safety first to bottom line first.

[eldakka]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

Avaiable on Youtube (I don't have Netflix so can't access that documentary) , The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams l Al Jazeera Investigations, they go into the change in culture at Boeing due to the Mcdonnel_Douglas merger that led to problems with the 787 program.

[eldakka]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

> There's a long-held opinion of some in the American aerospace industry that Boeing began it's decline after their acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas

It's what's commonly known as a 'reverse takeover'. Where the company being aquired is the entity that effectively gains control of the new merged company, with the aquireree's management being the ones becoming the management of the new body with the aquiror's management being the ones that get the flick.

Sometimes that can work where the company being aquired is a vibrant, rising organisation being taken over by a sluggish, giant-but on a downward trajectory 'old timer'. However, in the case of the Boeing - McDonnell-Douglas merger, it was the vibrant, still-effective Boeing doing the aquiring of a collapsing, bankrupt former rival in the form of McDonnell-Douglas, but that shit-show MD being the ones who came out on top in the merger, thus instilling Boeing with the MD culture and management that caused the latter to fail and need a bailout by merging with Boeing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

It happens in other fields. I work for a STEM faculty which was formed by merging a successful Math, Computing and Technology one with a failing Science one. The new faculty is run almost entirely by people from the science side - it's not as if they have many students to teach - and is failing brutally as a result of evaluation the same policies which knackered the science faculty.

[anothercynic]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

Not Manchester University, is it? ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That's what you get when you play the "We're the *safe* pair of hands" card

You too? No, mine is rather further south, though still north of London. The Peter Principle works powerfully in university departments.

[herman]

Could be worse

Boeing lost less on a real space ship than Meta lost on fictional junk.

[A Non e-mouse]

I hope Boeing have given proper thought to just giving up on this contract. It's a huge money pit for them and they'll never make it back.

[Flocke Kroes]

They had a plan ...

Starliner seats 5. NASA buys 4 of those seats for a price that was expected to cover costs and a reasonable profit. Boeing could then sell the fifth seat for a price competitive with Dragon and take all of that as profit. Costs have grown, the price is fixed and the fifth seat only earns money when the vehicle is fully operational.

If that were not enough, there are enough Atlas Vs reserved for the contracted Starliner launches. Anything beyond that requires either human rating Vulcan or convincing other customers to switch their reserved Atlas for a Vulcan. Vulcans requires 2 BE-4 engines each. One was delivered very late, another has not yet been delivered. Evidence for engines 3 and 4 would have been all over the rocket focused web sites if there was any. All I have heard of is an increased number of cars parked outside the factory.

NASA wants two independent human rated vehicles to assure access to space. Long term that is looking more and more like Dragon and Starship. Very long term, the small launch startups are talking about medium sized rockets for constellations (because the small launch market is far too small to support more than SpaceX + Rocket Lab). Some of that talk might turn into a real rocket big enough to launch people.

[Gene Cash]

Re: They had a plan ...

NASA wants two independent human rated vehicles to assure access to space

No matter how much we want to beat up on NASA, that was the smartest damn decision since the Apollo days.

Holy cow... can you imagine if we'd just gone with the "safe choice" of Boeing and not tossed any bones to SpaceX and they STILL haven't gotten to ISS, and *having* to buy Soyuz rides with the current situation with Russia?

Putin would not only charge us an arm, leg, and left nut, he'd probably be making serious political hay out of it.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: They had a plan ...

The whole point of the ISS was to fund Boeing-McDonnell-Douglas-Lockheed-Martin through any unfortunate peace dividend following the end of the cold war, and before we could find any new enemies worthy of a $Bn stealth bomber. And as a bonus make sure the USSR's boffins didn't all find new opportunities in the middle-east.

The 2 suppliers was never to avoid just Russia, it was to make sure that BMDLM didn't end up as a monopoly bidder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They had a plan ...

Shame for them then that both the last stealth bomber (B2) and the next one (B21) are being built by Northrop Grumman. The last bomber that Boeing built was the B52.

[Spazturtle]

Re: They had a plan ...

From the rumors it sounds like Boeing will not be allowed to participate in the next round of Commercial Crew as they have not yet fulfilled their existing launches.

"NASA wants two independent human rated vehicles to assure access to space. Long term that is looking more and more like Dragon and Starship."

The requirement is also for two independent suppliers.

We can assume that SpaceX will win one of the slots so that leaves the second slot as a competition between Blue Origin's bid and Dream Chaser.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They had a plan ...

Or the newly formed SpaceY ???

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: They had a plan ...

Or Virgin Galactic. Of course, climbing outside a flying 747 and wing-walking across to the rocket and climbing in might be a tad awkward.

[rg287]

I hope Boeing have given proper thought to just giving up on this contract. It's a huge money pit for them and they'll never make it back.

Thing is, without a human-rated capsule they are locked out of any future Crew contracts.

NASA aren't going to hand out any more contracts to R&D a capsule - they already did that and Dragon works fine. Boeing have had a very generous chunk of cash to develop Starliner and their options are to make it work, or walk away ceding whatever glimmer of credibility they have left and making themselves the also-ran in future contests (because they're now a high-risk supplier).

So if Boeing exit this programme, they're basically saying "We're exiting the manned space market and are incapable of competing with SpaceX".

Now, we already know the latter part of that to be true. Nobody can compete with SpaceX at the moment. They're leading the market on price, availability and reliability. But NASA would very much like to have Starliner there as a backup to Dragon. Without getting into sunk-cost fallacy, Boeing probably are far enough along now that it makes no sense to cancel. They're got Starliner to the ISS and back in one piece (unmanned). It's basically done.

So there's two things :

1. Unless Boeing wish to abandon that market sector entirely, they need Starliner (or another human-rated capsule) to offer when bidding on crew and cargo contracts.

2. Starliner is basically done - albeit wildly overpriced. They'll really want to get their contracted launches done and then be able to bid on new contracts to make some money back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another McDonnell Douglas management clusterf*ck...

Remember the good old days at Boeing. Before the late 1990's. When only every fourth or fifth project turned into a flaming train wreck. Financial or engineering.

Has any project started at Boeing after the last old line Boeing management was pushed out in the early 2000's not turned into a catastrophic disaster of some form or other. In the old days only McDonnell Douglas civil aircraft killed punters in large numbers due to engineering or management incompetence and malfeasance. But now Boeing is quickly catching up to the McDonnell Douglas kill count with the 737 Max and I am sure other horrors yet to happen.

Boeing is now little more than the walking dead. Just like IBM. The most humane solution is to take it out the back of the wood shed and put it out of its misery. Before it kills lots more people.

[martinusher]

Re: Just another McDonnell Douglas management clusterf*ck...

Boeing is McDonnel Douglas, it just doesn't use that name. When the two companies merged what actually happened was more like a takeover with the engineering driven Boeing being absorbed by the more corporate McDonnell. They missed the boat with SpaceX -- normal practice would be for them to engineer a corporate takeover of the smaller company and absorb its products and personnel. Now its a tossup which company is larger; its just fortunate that SpaceX does spacecraft and not commercial airliners.

Its no coincidence that Boeing management have moved further and further away from Seattle. Its now parked in Virginia, over the river from DC, the fiscal fire hose. Expect more and more beating of the 'national security' drum in the years to come.

[Xalran]

Re: Just another McDonnell Douglas management clusterf*ck...

They won't try the corporate takover with SpaceX... They know if they try to do it Elon will just perform an hostile takeover and fire all the executives...

After all $44Bn is more or less pocket money for him.

[anothercynic]

Re: Just another McDonnell Douglas management clusterf*ck...

They moved to Virginia for the pork. They moved to Chicago first for the prestige and tax breaks they got...

[eldakka]

Re: Just another McDonnell Douglas management clusterf*ck...

> Has any project started at Boeing after the last old line Boeing management was pushed out in the early 2000's not turned into a catastrophic disaster of some form or other.

The move of the corporate headquarters from being co-located with the engineers in Seattle to Chicago has been a success. At least from the perspective of the comfortable executive suites in Chicago that put them thousands of miles away from those pesky engineers so they can go about what is an engineering business without those annoying engineers butting in and pointing out the engineering problems with the executives plans.

[spold]

That's the trouble with them there space capsules...

BoeINg starLINER one day BIN LINER next day

[Lordrobot]

BOEING ... "AMTRAK ON FIRE"

No problem, the US Taxpayer will pick up the tab.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: BOEING ... "AMTRAK ON FIRE"

Directly: No. This is a fixed price contract.

Indirectly: I'm sure some black-ops projects could be sent Boeing's way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could they not just make a few changes to an Apollo capsule, fix the handling changes in software and then test the results on Asians and Africans? It's the Boeing way.

[spireite]

What they are building........

... surely is a higher altitude lawn dart.

These days, even Jeffs Blue Origin is held in greater esteem??

[fishman]

And limited use of Starliner

Another problem for Boeing is that they use the Atlas V booster to launch Starliner - which is going out of service. They will have to get it requalified on a new booster (Vulcan, New Glenn, ....) if they want to use it on future missions beyond the current number contracted with NASA.

[EnviableOne]

Boeing are out Businesses to get out of

They are beaten in Civil aviation by Airbus

They are beaten in the Military by Lockheed and Northrop

Now they are roundly beaten in space by Space X

I suppose the only thing they win at is Tax Breaks and Executive pay