Ouch.

Imcoster Syndrome

Embattled aerospace giant Boeing is in even bigger trouble after its plagued Starliner spacecraft left two NASA astronauts stranded earlier this year.

The project’s costs have continued to spiral over six weeks after the capsule returned to Earth without any astronauts on board. As SpaceNews reports, Boeing took a massive $250 million hit on the Starliner program in its third-quarter earnings, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s in addition to a $125 million write-off related to Starliner in the company’s second fiscal quarter this year.

The total cost of the failed commercial crew program has ballooned to around $1.85 billion, a stunning sum considering the company has been working on the spacecraft for over a decade and has yet to successfully deliver and then return astronauts to the space station.

The project, which is directly competing with SpaceX’s far more successful Crew Dragon spacecraft, is on thin ice, and Boeing has remained suspiciously vague about its future.

“We’ve got some tough contracts and there’s no magic bullet for that,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took over the reins in August, told investors during a recent earnings call, as quoted by SpaceNews. “We’re going to have to work our way through some of those tough contracts.”

Contracted

Ortberg, however, appeared defiant that Boeing will continue working on its much-maligned Starliner, saying that walking away from the project isn’t a “viable option for us.”

“Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we can walk away from these contracts,” he told investors, caveating a possible scenario where a given program goes from one phase of a contract to another.

It’s far from just Starliner that Boeing has to worry about. The company has plenty of other major fires to put out these days, including a commercial jet business in crisis and a massive industrial worker strike.

Overall, the company’s quarterly losses have surged to $6 billion, with Ortberg promising a “fundamental culture change.”

“This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again,” he told investors, as quoted by Reuters.

Where that leaves the future of Starliner remains unclear at best. Earlier this month, NASA announced it would make use of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for two upcoming crew rotation missions to the space station, the latter of which was originally scheduled to make use of Starliner.

“Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense are going to stay with The Boeing Company in the long run,” Ortberg said, “but there’s probably some things on the fringe that we can be more efficient with or that just distract us from our main goals.”

More on Starliner: NASA Abandons Boeing’s Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station