Boeing warns of more financial charges due to Starliner

Boeing is warning of another hit to its bottom line, at least partly at the hands of the company’s Calamity Capsule, the CST-100 Starliner.

In preliminary fourth-quarter results, Boeing said it expects a pre-tax earnings charge of $1.7 billion in its Defense, Space and Security division. $800 million of that is going on the KC-46A Pegasus Tanker program, $500 million on higher estimated costs on production for the T-7A trainer, and the remaining $400 million going on the Commercial Crew, VC-25B, and MQ-25 programs.

VC-25B is the new Boeing 747-based Air Force One, MQ-25 is a drone capable of performing aerial refueling, and Commercial Crew? The CST in CST-100 stands for Commercial Space Transportation, with the Calamity Capsule being specifically developed in collaboration with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

It is not clear how much of the $400 million charge is going to be accounted for by the CST-100 itself – Boeing is scheduled to report calendar fourth-quarter results on January 28. However, Starliner losses are already closing in on the $2 billion mark. In 2022, cumulative losses were nearing $1 billion and have continued to mount as Boeing struggled to get the spacecraft to the point where it could be declared operational.

Boeing had to repeat CST-100’s first attempt to reach the International Space Station (ISS) after the uncrewed test flight failed to reach the outpost and almost ended in disaster. Several years later, Boeing was finally ready to launch a craft with astronauts inside to the orbiting laboratory. However, after a multitude of problems following the launch, NASA opted to send the capsule back without a crew.

Instead, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – who should have been back on Earth months ago – are expected return home in late March aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

SpaceX was selected alongside Boeing to provide commercial crew services for NASA. However, while Musk’s biz has launched crew to the ISS and brought them back since 2020, Boeing has yet to manage both parts of the equation.

There has been little in the way of updates from either NASA or Boeing since Starliner made a successful uncrewed return in 2024, leading to speculation that Boeing might be about to throw in the towel on the whole enterprise rather than continuing to burn cash – you can make your own malfunctioning thruster joke here.

In Space Capital’s Q4 2024 Space Investment Quarterly [PDF], the venture capitalists predicted that in 2025 Boeing and Airbus would sell off their space businesses “after failing to keep up with the pace of change.”

For Boeing’s Commercial Crew program, it is not so much keeping up with the pace of change. It can’t even complete a first operational mission. ®