Why NASA is sticking with Boeing

Could things get any worse for Boeing? 

Last week, the company’s Starliner spacecraft landed in New Mexico, having made its way home from the International Space Station without its crew. Left behind are two astronauts unexpectedly stuck aboard the ISS for months thanks to Boeing’s failure. They will have to wait to be rescued by Boeing’s archnemesis, SpaceX. The whole thing has been an acute embarrassment for the world’s largest aerospace company already under fire for a series of widely publicized problems with its airplanes.

And yet, while public opinion of Boeing may be dropping fast, NASA has stood by the company and repeatedly expressed its confidence in the spacecraft and its commitment to the relationship. 

That support might be baffling to most people. After all, Starliner is heavily delayed, having been originally intended to perform its first crewed test flight in 2017. And it has faced a series of messy problems during its development, including a failed orbital test flight in 2019. The spacecraft leaked helium on its recent outward journey, and some of its thrusters failed — another black eye for a company that was once the stand-in for quality engineering.

After months of investigation, NASA decided it would rather not put its astronauts on the return leg of the spacecraft’s test flight and would instead leave them on the ISS to be carried home by a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

It was an underwhelming end to a mission that has been a disappointment for the American space program and a hit to Boeing’s reputation in particular. Originally scheduled to last eight days, the mission ended up stretching over three months of tedious troubleshooting as engineers tried and failed to find a reliable fix for the thrusters.

But NASA won’t throw Boeing under the bus. Its position is clear: the SpaceX Dragon is not enough. The agency wants two commercially operated transport options to carry astronauts to the space station.

“The main goal of the agency’s commercial crew program is two, unique human spaceflight systems,” Steven Siceloff, NASA spokesperson said in comments emailed to The Verge. “Should any one system encounter an issue, NASA still has the capability to launch and return crew to ensure safety and a continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station.”

The reasons for wanting two providers are both practical: NASA can still get its astronauts to the ISS if there is an issue with one company — as happened briefly with SpaceX recently — and also, presumably, because of wariness over a single private company holding that much power over the US’s access to space.

Both House lawmakers and Pentagon officials have expressed concerns over NASA’s reliance on SpaceX, which was only further emphasized by the choice to use a Crew Dragon to carry the Starliner astronauts home. And while SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has enjoyed a broadly positive relationship with the US government, his increasingly temperamental behavior, overt racism, and right-wing political leanings reportedly have officials worried about his control over launch capabilities and space infrastructure through Starlink. 

NASA has made no comment on Musk or his behavior, nor has it waded into the hostilities between SpaceX and Boeing. The agency has expressed public support for both companies in their space development — despite the ongoing disappointments of Boeing’s Starliner program.

NASA is walking a difficult line, dealing with a tight budget while trying to push through expensive and ambitious plans to return to the Moon. It must maintain positive relationships with both of the companies it relies on for transport to the ISS, while still promoting an image of innovation and careful spending to the public and staying out of the increasingly negative news stories about the current state of Boeing and its relationship with SpaceX.

“The companies have some bad feelings toward each other, and their own sets of fans have bad feelings toward each other, and so then NASA, in a sense, is kind of caught in the middle,” said Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida, who worked at NASA on human space flight programs for over a decade. 

Many of the headlines about the Starliner have focused on the plight of the two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were traveling in the spacecraft. While it’s hard to ascertain the seriousness of the Starliner’s problems until a full review of the mission is completed, it is important to note that the astronauts are safe aboard the space station and are not in any particular danger. Initial reports suggest that they would have been fine had they traveled home on the Starliner as originally planned.

Officials have alluded to a great deal of debate within NASA about whether the Starliner should have been used to fly the astronauts home. But in the end, NASA defaulted to the cautious approach, a norm within the agency that has been in place for decades following the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

NASA didn’t need to use the Starliner because, for the first time, there was another option available. The Starliner would probably have been safe to fly, most observers seemed to agree at the time, but why take the risk? With the SpaceX Dragon, there was a known safe alternative.

“In the past, they may have gone ahead and flown it,” Metzger said. And if SpaceX were running its own test flight that experienced similar problems and was in charge of decision-making, he said, it might have chosen to go ahead with the flight, “because SpaceX doesn’t seem to be as cautious as Boeing or NASA.”

It was this culture of risk-taking that allowed SpaceX to rapidly develop its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, which were certified as safe for human spaceflight in 2020. That was still three years after the initial aim of 2017, but it has been in regular use since then, carrying astronauts to the ISS on eight operational NASA commercial crew flights. 

The drawbacks of SpaceX’s “move fast and break things” approach are explosive rocket tests like the Starship launches and the environmental damage they cause and a workplace that is reportedly rife with sexism and worker injuries.

When it comes to human spaceflight, the consequences for misjudging a risk could be lethal, and there’s good reason for caution. Developing spaceflight hardware for human use is not like other startup fields or even like satellite deployment, as previous disasters have shown. The total number of companies that have developed a fully orbital human spaceflight vehicle is just two, and it remains to be seen whether SpaceX is the outlier in terms of successful testing or Boeing is.

Now, the future of the Starliner is unclear. NASA has not yet announced whether another test flight will be required before the Starliner can be certified for regular use, and Boeing’s commitment to the program seems to be wavering. 

Boeing declined to answer specific questions about the Starliner before its departure but said in a statement, “Boeing continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft. We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”

One of the reasons that the Starliner program has seemed so scattered from the outside is that it is essentially part of an experiment. When NASA awarded contracts for the commercial crew program in 2011, it signaled a new way of doing business: for this program, NASA would not be paying contractors to build its spacecraft. Rather, it would stay hands-off and allow companies to develop their own designs, on which NASA would purchase seats.

That model takes advantage of growing expertise in the private space sector, but it requires that space exploration be commercially viable. Why would a company develop a spacecraft if it couldn’t make money from it?

Today, we have billionaires like Musk with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin risking their own capital in service of big space dreams. But for more traditional companies like Boeing, there needs to be a business case to build a spacecraft. With further development work required for the Starliner and the closure of the ISS planned for 2031, it’s not clear if there are enough opportunities for flights to make a reasonable return on investment.

“It’s not easy to find business models that make sense,” Metzger said. “This is the hard problem of space… I don’t think Boeing ever really had a business case.”

To put it mildly, Boeing has had an extremely bad year. From doors that fall off its airplanes and a spacecraft with temperamental thrusters to a workforce threatening to strike, the company has clearly focused more on the bottom line than on quality engineering. 

But NASA has notably stood by Boeing, expressing confidence in the company’s ability to get the Starliner working and praising the many things about the Starliner that do work well.

“Spaceflight is one of the most challenging endeavors we undertake as humans, and setbacks are to be expected,” said Siceloff, the NASA spokesperson. “What’s important is how our teams work together to understand the challenges experienced and implement changes to move forward.”

That response can seem puzzling, as NASA has spent billions of dollars with no working spacecraft to show for it. But NASA isn’t going to publicly criticize Boeing because it was heavily involved in the decision to fly the Starliner, and it is toeing a careful line between public relations and political support.

“They don’t want to attack commercial companies,” Metzger said. “They don’t want to disaffect the precarious political balance that they’ve achieved in Congress, which has enabled funding these programs.”

The politicking of what jobs are being sent to what states by what businesses and the impact that has on congressional funding is the reality of the US’s dreamy ambitions of space exploration. But that’s the nature of trying to get things done in a publicly funded agency.

“People don’t like the way NASA is doing business right now. But what I like to say is, ‘The space program that gets funded is better than every space program that gets canceled,’” Metzger said. “If you can’t get through the political process, then, by definition, your space program is a failure.”

When it comes down to it, despite all of the issues with the Starliner, NASA is making out quite well. Unlike most NASA projects, Boeing and SpaceX are on a fixed-price services contract — so NASA is only required to pay a fixed sum for use of a spacecraft, while delays or overruns are paid by the companies.

“From a purely financial perspective, this continues to be a great financial deal for the space agency because they’re not paying the overruns to either company,” explained Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. The overruns for the ongoing Starliner disaster are being paid for by Boeing, not NASA.

According to a report by The Planetary Society, the per-seat cost of a flight on a Starliner or Crew Dragon spacecraft is a fraction of that of historical programs like Space Shuttle and Apollo or NASA’s current Orion spacecraft. It’s hard to make direct comparisons because those programs have different aims from commercial crew, but they indicate the high costs that had previously been typical of human spaceflight. 

NASA saves money by not having to rent expensive seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft or develop its own alternative and instead pays SpaceX for each ride. With a regular cadence of astronauts traveling to and from the ISS, the payment for those rides should cover the cost of developing the Dragon.

Compared to SpaceX, though, Boeing has clearly struggled. NASA awarded a $4.2 billion contract to Boeing for the Starliner but paid just $2.6 billion to SpaceX for the Crew Dragon — and the Crew Dragon has been in successful operation since 2020.

That’s part of Boeing’s problem: it needs to clear an extremely high bar. “SpaceX has been so wildly successful that I think it’s created this paradigm of expectation that these will all work and deliver fantastic results for less money,” Dreier said. “And it’s like, well, there’s only really one company like SpaceX. That’s SpaceX.”

Again, the $1.6 billion in cost overruns for the Starliner is being paid by Boeing and not NASA. The company’s then-CEO, Dave Calhoun, said that the company would never take on a fixed-price contract again. But this points to a different kind of risk: what happens if Boeing cuts its losses and walks away from the project entirely?

A report released on Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine throws some cold water on NASA’s optimism about commercial partnerships. It warns that continuing to outsource highly specialized projects to commercial entities could erode NASA’s internal expertise and leadership — essentially, that NASA could become an organization of middle managers rather than engineers.

And it raises the risk that comes from a commercial provider failing to deliver on its contract or exiting the market altogether. In the case of Boeing, the company is big enough to absorb the financial hit of a long development process, but some of the smaller companies NASA is now contracting for lunar projects may not be.

When the Starliner landed safely, NASA officials were quick to point out all that went well in its test flight and to reiterate their confidence that Starliner would fly astronauts in the future.

Boeing’s response, however, was rather tepid. The company has yet to state a firm commitment to the Starliner’s future, and in a brief statement, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, said, “I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing. We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”

If Boeing bows out, it could potentially license the Starliner to another operator, Metzger speculated, where it could be used for tourist flights or trips to planned commercial space stations.

But Dreier thinks it’s unlikely that Boeing would walk away from the Starliner at this point. There’s still $1.9 billion of potential revenue on the table, not to mention the reputational hit of giving up on the spacecraft.

“Boeing happens to be a fantastically rich, deep-pocketed aerospace contractor that pulls in $50 billion a year, mainly from government contracts, so they can absorb a $1.6 billion loss,” Dreier said. “It’s too high profile of a project for them to give up on.”

In the short term, there’s no doubt that Boeing has dramatically underperformed in its development of the Starliner, especially when compared to SpaceX. But in the long run, having two commercial providers of transport is essential — and still a great deal for NASA.

When held up next to the endlessly ballooning costs and excesses of other NASA programs such as the agency’s Space Launch System rocket, the commercial crew program stands out as promoting exactly the kind of fierce competition between companies that is said to drive innovation and lower costs. Many people have called for NASA to take more risks and to meet the lean startup culture that now characterizes the upper echelons of American businesses. “This is exactly what we want NASA to be doing,” Dreier said. “I think NASA should be very pleased with everything that’s happened, despite what is going on at Boeing.”

NASA, of course, isn’t a startup. It must balance a drive for efficiency and speed with the need to keep astronauts safe and prevent another nationally traumatizing catastrophe.

But most importantly, there’s a pressing need to avoid a single US provider controlling access to the ISS. SpaceX’s dominance in space has already resulted in Musk having an outsize influence on global politics, concentrating more power in the hands of one man whose judgment appears dubious at best. The only way to hedge against this is to have a second provider available.

Even after the embarrassment of the Starliner, Boeing is still its best bet.