Boeing’s Starliner Losses Reach $2 Billion

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission today, Boeing said it experienced a total of $523 million in losses in the Starliner Commercial Crew Program in 2024.  That brings to $2 billion the amount Boeing has had to pay for overruns on the fixed-price contract with NASA to build a space transportation system to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station. Boeing is still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong with the propulsion system on the Crew Flight Test mission last year and how to get Starliner ready for operational flights.

Boeing filed its 10-K report with the SEC today after announcing fourth quarter 2024 results during a January 28 earnings call.  Starliner is one of five troubled fixed-priced contracts in Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security (BDS) division. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg didn’t specifically mention Starliner, but said they need to be “more proactive and clear-eyed on the risks and our estimates to complete the projects.”  While there is “no silver bullet … I do feel better about our ability to better manage the performance in 2025.”

The other four are T-7A Red Hawk Advanced Pilot Training System, KC-46A Pegasus Tanker, VC-25B Presidential Airplane, and MQ-25 Stingray aerial refueling drone. Along with Starliner, they accounted for $1.7 billion in losses in the fourth quarter of 2024.  For the year overall, the losses were $5.013 billion:  KC-46A Tanker ($2.002 billion), T-7A Red Hawk ($1.770 billion), Commercial Crew ($523 million), VC-25B ($379 million), and MQ-25 ($339 million).

Boeing confirmed to SpacePolicyOnline.com in July 2024 that the losses on Starliner had reached $1.6 billion. Another $250 million was added in October, bringing it to $1.85 billion. Based on the data released today, another $138 million was incurred in the fourth quarter making the total Boeing has had to absorb just under $2 billion.

Boeing added in the 10-K report that as of the end of 2024 they had about $398 million of “capitalized precontract costs” and $150 million of “potential termination liabilities to suppliers related to unauthorized future missions” for Starliner.

Starliner is the name of Boeing’s spacecraft that’s being built through NASA’s commercial crew program. Boeing refers to it as Commercial Crew in its financial statements.

NASA’s space shuttle was designed to take crews to and from the ISS, but the decision to terminate it in 2011 meant NASA had to find an alternative. It entered into fixed-price contracts with Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop commercial crew space transportation systems through Public-Private Partnerships.  NASA wanted two suppliers to ensure redundancy and competition. The government and the companies shared in development costs with the companies retaining ownership of the systems and NASA guaranteeing to purchase a certain amount of services. The companies were expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case. SpaceX was awarded $2.6 billion, while Boeing got $4.2 billion.

Both companies had to demonstrate their vehicles were safe enough to carry NASA astronauts by launching an uncrewed flight test and then a crewed flight test.  Space X accomplished the first in 2019 and the second in 2020 and has been flying operational flights for NASA and non-NASA customers ever since.

Boeing is struggling,  however. An uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) in 2019 exposed significant technical problems. It was almost two years before the company was ready to repeat the uncrewed test in August 2021, but it was scrubbed just hours before launch because of corroded valves. That second uncrewed test, OFT-2, ultimately was successful in 2022 and Boeing and NASA were getting ready for a test flight with a crew, Crew Flight Test (CFT), in 2023 when additional problems emerged delaying it until June 2024.

CFT finally launched on June 5, 2024 with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were supposed to dock with the ISS and stay for eight days.  Starliner experienced propulsion anomalies on the trip to the ISS, however, and after weeks of analysis NASA decided the spacecraft was not safe enough to bring them back to Earth. It returned to Earth without incident on September 6.

Boeing is still trying to determine the root cause of the propulsion system failures. Neither NASA nor Boeing have provided any updates. NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel reported last week that the anomalies “will remain open for further pending test campaigns.”

Butch and Suni are still aboard the ISS. The ISS has been permanently occupied with crews rotating on roughly 6-month schedules for more than 24 years. NASA reconfigured the next regular crew rotation mission, Crew-9, and Butch and Suni became part of that crew. Suni is now the ISS commander and she and Butch just completed a spacewalk on Thursday.  They and their Crew-9 crewmates Nick Hague (NASA) and Aleksandr Gorbunov (Roscosmos) can come home anytime, but are waiting for their replacements to arrive on SpaceX’s Crew-10 spacecraft. SpaceX is building a new Crew Dragon that Crew-10 will use, but it has been delayed.  Crew-9 will come back to Earth whenever SpaceX is ready to launch Crew-10.

 

This article has been updated.