While SpaceX CEO and White House advisor Elon Musk and the Trump administration allow NASA's operations to languish, the specter of embattled aerospace giant Boeing's disastrous Starliner project still looms large.
In an official filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Boeing revealed that it took a staggering $523 million in charges on its ill-fated spacecraft last year.
As SpaceNews points out, that means Boeing has lost just over $2 billion on the project since it began.
The spacecraft struggled to deliver Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station during its first Crew Flight Test mission in June, showing persistent technical issues involving leaks and malfunctioning thrusters.
NASA deemed the problems serious enough to return the pair on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft sometime next month instead, while Starliner made the reentry uncrewed (to its credit, it survived.)
NASA has since been briefed about the subsequent investigation into the mission. As SpaceNews reports, NASA found "significant progress" on some issues, while the pesky thruster problems have yet to be resolved.
"The details shared by NASA gave us confidence that they are focusing on the right core issues and the related path to safely flying Starliner," NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel member Paul Hill said at a briefing last week.
But whether the struggling spacecraft, which was developed under the agency's same Commercial Crew program as SpaceX's Crew Dragon, will fly again remains unknown.
Following the disastrous mission in August, Boeing officials refused to make any promises about a follow-up mission, instead hinting at the possibility that the project could be canceled altogether.
"Do they ultimately exit the program because it’s too complicated and because the other guy can do it better?" Melius Research analyst Robert Spingarn told Bloomberg at the time. "It can happen."
In October, rumors swirled that Boeing was looking to sell its entire space business, which would include Starliner. But whether those "early talks" ever culminated in a decision remains to be seen.
The aerospace giant has already been struggling with a chaotic commercial jet business and a massive strike that ground airplane production to a standstill last year.
In the meantime, Wilmore and Williams are still stuck on board the ISS, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk renewing calls to "rescue" them, despite an existing plan for their return.
And time is quickly running out in a bigger sense, with NASA planning to retire the aging orbital outpost within the next five years, giving Boeing very little flexibility to get Starliner in working order.
"There is no logical purpose to Starliner, given that NASA plans to deorbit Space Station in ~5 years," Musk tweeted in November.
More on Starliner: Stranded Astronauts' Trip Back to Earth Has Been Postponed Yet Again
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