Is it time to cancel the Boeing Starliner?

While the SpaceX Crew Dragon has become the basis of a commercial space line, operating since May 2020, the other vehicle in the Commercial Crew Program, the Boeing Starliner, remains snake bit and on the ground. Ars Technica reports that another two technical glitches have delayed the first crewed mission of the Starliner indefinitely.

Arts Technica explains that “soft links” in lines connecting Starliner to its parachutes “were not as strong as previously believed,” by Boeing. It said that the parachute system, which is set up to land Starliner safely if one of its three parachutes fails, could fail if one of the soft links snapped.

The second issue, the story says, involves a glass cloth tape that covers “hundreds of feet” of wiring harnesses “throughout the vehicle.” The tape was discovered to be flammable “under certain circumstances possible in flight.”

Either issue could cause a catastrophe that could end a Starliner mission and kill the crew. The best that can be said is that they were found before the test flight scheduled for July 21 and not during.

Boeing has vowed to fix the problems and, eventually, fly the Starliner. However, since the company is working from a fixed-price contract, the extra money required to get the spaceship operational is going to come from Boeing and not NASA or the government. The whole concept of Commercial Crew has been that the government would not cover any cost overruns that have traditionally plagued aerospace projects. The idea was that contractors would have the incentive to keep costs low.

Boeing will probably never make a profit on Starliner. The fact is fraught with irony because when the Commercial Crew contracts were first awarded, Boeing was considered the odds-on favorite to have a spacecraft flying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Indeed, as both NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said at the time, the inclusion of Boeing sealed the deal with Congress. Boeing has been churning out space hardware since the Apollo program. SpaceX was a young upstart that few if any people in Congress had confidence in.

Fast forward over a decade and SpaceX is the gold standard for space launch, having lowered its cost by orders of magnitude. Costs aside, Boeing has every incentive to plow ahead and get the Starliner operational. Its brand as an aerospace company that can build and fly hardware depends on it.

The numerous schedule delays and cost overruns surrounding the Space Launch System have hurt the company’s image. A recent lawsuit alleging theft of intellectual property committed by Boeing, which may have led to the Space Launch System problems, is even more damaging,

Still, NASA cannot wait forever for Boeing to get the Starliner operational. While Crew Dragon has been functioning splendidly, the strategy of Commercial Crew is to have two operational vehicles capable of taking astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. The approach fosters competition and allows for redundancy in case one vehicle runs into trouble.

As it turns out, a potential alternative is waiting in the wings. Space News recently reported that the cargo version of the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser should be ready to fly in either late 2023 or early 2024. The Dream Chaser is a lift-body spacecraft that will launch vertically on top of a Vulcan Centaur rocket and then land horizontally when it returns to Earth, much like the space shuttle used to do.

A crewed version of the Dream Chaser had been in the running for the Commercial Crew program but failed to make the cut. Sierra Nevada is still working on the crewed Dream Chaser for the commercial market, for activities such as space tourism and servicing commercial space stations. No reason exists that, should Boeing fail to deliver the Starliner, the crewed Dream Chaser could not step into the breach.

Ironically, Sierra Nevada has been another of those upstart commercial space companies, like SpaceX, that few people used to take seriously. Boeing would do well to learn from its competitors and reinvent itself accordingly.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.  He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.