Guess We Wait Another Day for Starliner

Word got out around 8:30 PM that the Crewed Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner has been scrubbed for at least 24 hours, apparently due to an out of bounds reading from the Atlas V booster.  The exact problem wasn't talked about while I was watching/listening to the video coverage on NASA Spaceflight.com.

As of now, 9 PM as I write, the scrub has been called a 24 hour scrub, but that can change as the fault is looked into in more detail. 

Payload has provided a good summary of the story behind Starliner and how it got to this point. A more pointed story comes form Eric Berger at Ars Technica, who says, “The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all.” 

From where we sit today, knowing the story along the way, it's easy to lose sight of important details. Ten years ago when the private crewed spacecraft contracts were first being debated and discussed, pretty much everyone thought Boeing would be the easy winner. 

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

In addition to that $4.2 billion fixed price contract that they blew through, they've spent more money out their own pockets - an additional loss of $1.5 billion. In addition to that $1.5 billion loss, there are costs from lost opportunities. Dragon first carried people to the space station nearly four years ago. In that span, the Crew Dragon vehicle has flown thirteen public and private missions to orbit. Because of this success, Dragon will end up flying 14 operational missions to the station for NASA, earning a tidy fee each time, compared to just six for Starliner. 

The problems Boeing had were all self-created, all a result of their corporate culture not knowing how to manage a fixed price contract, instead of the cost-plus contracts behind everything else the spacecraft division of Boeing worked on. There are stories of different software groups essentially refusing to work with each other, managers creating "milestones" on their schedule that would get a payday when NASA approved but that meant little or nothing. There are stories that some Boeing managers have said, "we're never doing that again" when questioned about fixed price contracts and others say they will. In a time when the private sector is practically bursting with small, hungry, hardworking companies, if Boeing can't figure out how to live with fixed price contracts, those small companies will eat their lunch. Or buy the space division from Boeing and put them out of the business.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner being installed on its Atlas 5 rocket last week. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett