It's a Boeing Kind of Day

A couple of unrelated small stories about the giant corporation.

Boeing is Still Bleeding Cash on Starliner

Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, led the company's first quarterly finance report since becoming CEO on Monday, Oct. 21. The world was expecting a report of loss of value with the labor troubles, the resulting strike, and troubles with various products including Starliner. The company reported a loss of $6.2 billion. Starliner was a small part of that, $250 million or 4%.  Both of those numbers ($6.2b and $250m) are just from the last quarter: July through September. 

Back around the less-than-glorious conclusion of the Starliner Crewed Flight Test, I had found (and posted) that as of July, Boeing has reported nearly $1.6 billion in losses to pay for delays and fix technical problems on Starliner.  I think that means the $250 million is on top of the $1.6 billion. The problem flowing out of this one is that Boeing has to resolve the thruster problems and helium leaks that led NASA to tell them to leave astronauts Butch and Suni on the space station to bring Starliner home empty. Industry watchers say that could take many months, a year or more, and will cost additional hundreds of millions of dollars, and this was shown in the SEC filing Boeing submitted Wednesday.

After that September end of the mission, NASA said it didn't know when it would buy more Starliner missions and Boeing said they didn't know when they'd be ready - with an implication they may not be willing to spend the money.

A week after Starliner landed, Boeing's chief financial officer, Brian West, echoed that line. "There is important work to determine any next steps for the Starliner program, and we'll evaluate that," he said at a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley. 

 One aspect of Ortberg's presentation stood out like a sore thumb to me.  

In response to questions Wednesday from Wall Street investment firms, Ortberg, who took the CEO job in August, suggested it's time for Boeing to look at cutting some of its losses and recalibrate how it pursues new business opportunities. Boeing's previous CEO, Dave Calhoun, said last year the company would no longer enter into fixed-price development contracts.

"I think that that we're better off being doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well," Ortberg said. "So we're in the process of taking an evaluation of the portfolio. It's something a new CEO always does when you come into a business."
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Ortberg didn't specify any programs that Boeing might consider trimming or canceling, but said the company's "core" business of commercial airplanes and military systems will stay.

In even fewer words, "we're an airplane company." There were some words that might convince me that they're willing to stay with programs like the Artemis/SLS program, which has been financially much worse for the American people and our space programs than for Boeing. I can't say I'm convinced they'll stay with Starliner.

NASA still wants to certify Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to provide the agency with a second commercial option for getting astronauts into orbit. A fundamental goal set out for NASA's commercial crew program more than a decade ago was to develop two dissimilar human-rated transportation systems for access to low-Earth orbit. The idea here is competition will drive down costs, and NASA will have a backup option if one of the commercial crew providers runs into difficulties.

NASA hasn't said they're going to require a crewed mission to the ISS before they'd grant certification to Starliner and there's talk they're looking at flying Starliner as a cargo ship to the ISS, which could allow them to verify that fixes done to the helium leaks and thruster issues have been successful. 

NASA is making moves while assuming Boeing will stay in the game. Astronauts are still assigned to train for the first operational Starliner mission, although it's not likely to happen until the end of next year or in 2026. Earlier this month, NASA announced SpaceX will launch a four-person crew to the International Space Station no earlier than July of next year, taking a slot that the agency once hoped Boeing would use.

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It's hard to assess blame on this addendum

Kelly Ortberg's stances that they're an aircraft company and they should work at "doing less and doing it better," seem like they could be a pretty solid introduction to this story.  

An Intelsat satellite in geosynchronous orbit that Boeing was the prime contractor on exploded on orbit, according to Intelsat declaring it "a total loss" on Monday Oct. 21. 

The Intelsat-33e communications satellite is no longer operational after an outage Oct. 19; affected customers are being moved to other platforms, the company added in a statement. Meanwhile, U.S. Space Force was tracking around 20 pieces shortly after the incident, the military branch noted on X, formerly Twitter.

The satellite had been in service for seven years while other satellites like it are rated for between 15 to 20 years.  Even then, failure by explosion is rare, which opens the possibility that a piece of space junk or space rock struck it.  In addition the report that the USSF was tracking "around 20 pieces" might have been a bit premature.  Swiss tracking company s2a Systems noted 40 fragments as of Monday (Oct. 21). Another tracking company in the U.S., ExoAnalytic Solutions, saw 57 pieces that same day. 

The geosynchronous orbit is a relatively small area of the sky, 22,236 miles above Earth and there are satellites spaced 2 degrees apart. I imagine tracking the exact positions of all the fragments is a bit more difficult than tracking larger objects but I have to assume (and the article says) that there is concern that the fragments could damage another satellite. 

An artist's impression of the Intelsat 33e communications satellite. (Image credit: Boeing)