Boeing should bail and NASA will grumble at the sunk cost of their failed pursuit of redundancy but everyone will be better off.
When the ISS had at least 10 years left, paying the increasing costs for Boeing's failures might have been worth it. With only about 5 years left now for crew transport, SpaceX can build one or two more Crew Dragons and cover the load with a vehicle that's well-proved and far less costly than Starliner.
If Boeing is forced to re-do this test, if NASA calls CFT a failure and Boeing has to eat the cost of re-doing it, I think Boeing bails. The 5 flights they might still get paid for wouldn't be worth it after the cost of another test.
If NASA has the astronauts return on Dragon, Starliner is cooked regardless of what Boeing wants and Boeing wears that black eye for NASA and even some of its DOD supporters.
I think Boeing wants out and NASA's trying to hold onto them. This test isn't about Starliner so much as it is about how NASA and Boeing wind down this program.
Can you blame them? Just today it came out Musk was funding an organization that had set up fake voter registration websites in swing states to collect voter data. In EVs there are many options to avoid Musk and his products. In Space there is nothing.
Wonder if it would be possible to create a new space entity: you take half the funds given to Boeing's program, stand up new company and poach SpaceX employees with extremely aggressive offers. He has nothing without his employees's sacrifices. Its amazing that he manages to retain such great talent while continually treating them like crap(from everyone I spoke to and read about it is true).
Regardless of what you think about him, he’s good at something. It’s not grifting; there are plenty of people good at that who couldn’t possibly hit this level of success.
As a part-time CEO, he probably deserves part-time credit.
(I am 100% a SpaceX fan, personally. Whatever it is that has made it work.)
*buy pre-existing companies
Tesla was four guys with the brand name and nothing else when Musk came along six months after founding. Given that Musk was the first large outside investor and invested in/joined the company four years before Roadster (which he heavily participated in designing) deliveries began, I don't think it's unreasonable to call him a founder even aside from such being legal fact.
Apparently, the root cause is thermal overheating due to a design flaw in the thruster enclosure ("doghouse"), where the design provides insufficient cooling. [0] The problematic thrusters are all in the same area, which is likely the worst affected by the overheating. Boeing can't explain exactly why this particular thruster within that area failed permanently and the other four only failed intermittently, but when you are pushing a system to its thermal limits, it is expected that the outcome will be less than completely deterministic. And of course, Boeing wouldn't be eager to give the root cause as "our design is flawed and we didn't do adequate pre-flight testing to pick up on it, and our thermal analysis was flawed too". Much better to say "we still don't know".
> Boeing should bail and NASA will grumble at the sunk cost of their failed pursuit of redundancy but everyone will be better off.
Boeing can't bail. If they break the contract, it will be a black mark on their federal contracting record, which will harm their ability to win new contracts – not just with NASA, but more importantly with the Pentagon, which is where the real money is for Boeing.
That said, if Boeing really wants out, they will likely lobby to have NASA terminate the contract "for the convenience of the government" – so officially it is NASA who is cancelling it, with the result that Boeing's federal contracting record remains clean on paper.
[0] https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-iss-hot-fire-reentry-...
It's one reason why I abhor programmers who call themselves "Software Engineers". If you don't get to make the go/no-go FINAL call, you are not an engineer.
Notice engineering has no say in budgets, hiring numbers, time to delivery etc.
Managements making all the wrong decisions over years, and then blaming a dozen engineers for not working themselves to death to cover it is not something that will sell in serious discussions.
No one actually thinks this
“If NASA defers to its fallback plan, flying on Dragon, it may spell the end of the Starliner program. During the development and testing of Starliner, the company has already lost $1.6 billion. Reflying a crew test flight mission, which likely would be necessary should Starliner return autonomously, would cost much more. Boeing might opt to cancel Starliner and leave NASA with just a single provider of crew transportation. That would be painful for both NASA and Boeing.”
I think it depends on what you consider "long term". Starliner is being certified to fly on the Atlas V. But ULA has discontinued that rocket because the first stage engines are manufactured in Russia.
Boeing has 6 more rockets - one for each of the operational flights that NASA has contracted to service the ISS, but once those are used up, Boeing would have to recertify the capsule on a different rocket (presumably ULA's new Vulcan rocket). Presumably this recertification effort would be much easier since both the rocket and (presumably by that point) Starliner would be operating successfully, so it'd largely be a matter of analysis and other paperwork. But it would still take considerable time and expense.
I am more interested what this does to a programme mired in cost overruns, delays and failure. In an election year. Mechanically, you would think this problem with helium leaks is fixable. Politically, this may be the straw which breaks the camels back.