There it is.
Fire Sale
Embattled aerospace giant Boeing is reportedly looking to sell off its space business following the disastrous crewed test launch of its much-maligned Starliner that left two NASA astronauts stranded in space.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, insider sources claim that Boeing is looking to get out of the space race altogether in the face of a deepening financial crisis — a startling about-face for a company that’s worked on iconic space vehicles ranging from NASA’s Space Shuttle to the International Space Station.
The embattled contractor even approached Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, per the WSJ‘s reporting, which has been working on its own rockets for NASA.
Despite a decade of development, Boeing has yet to successfully deliver and return astronauts on board its Starliner capsule, a damning indictment of a company that already has several major fires to put out.
In other words, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Boeing is looking to cut its losses — but buyer beware.
Ballast So Hard
Boeing has been burning through billions of dollars as its commercial jet business continues to grapple with concerning quality control issues and an ongoing industrial worker strike of epic proportions. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Boeing is set to fire ten percent of its workforce, amounting to a staggering 17,000 employees.
And Starliner, its entry into NASA’s Commercial Crew program, hasn’t fared any better. The capsule left the International Space Station last month without any passengers on board due to nagging technical issues that NASA deemed too dangerous for a crewed return.
According to its latest filings with regulators, the company took another massive $250 million loss on its Starliner commercial crew program in its third fiscal year quarter, bringing the total losses of the spacecraft’s development to a stunning $1.85 billion.
NASA also recently announced that an upcoming crew rotation flight to the ISS would make use of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon instead of Starliner.
Despite looking for a buyer for Starliner, Boeing is reportedly still committed to overseeing the development of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which is set to deliver the first astronauts to the surface of the Moon in over half a century no earlier than two years from now.
Nonetheless, NASA’s inspector general concluded in a damning August report that Boeing’s contributions were woefully behind schedule and way over budget.
In short, Boeing’s recently minted CEO Kelly Ortberg now has the seemingly impossible task of picking up the pieces — and ditching the parts of the business that are weighing down a company actively in crisis.
“We’re better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” he told analysts during a call this week. “What do we want this company to look like five and ten years from now? And do these things add value to the company or distract us?”
More on Starliner: NASA Abandons Boeing’s Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station
