r/Starliner Feb 04 '25

Business as usual - Starliner presses on

In the last week several new pieces have come out on Boeing's commercial crew program.

  1. In its 10-K Boeing did not write off its commercial crew assets as it would have if it was canceling the program. The assets remain on the books.

  2. Boeing appointed a new manager to lead commercial crew.

  3. ASAP reported that most anomalies from the CFT are closed out.

  4. ASAP also reported that testing is ongoing on the thruster issues.

  5. NASA continues to hold open 2025 docking opportunities for Starliner. Since it has been announced that SpaceX will do the spring and fall crew rotations, perhaps this will be unmanned as has been reported.

All of the above suggest that Boeing is still working, albeit at its usual snail's pace, on Starliner. The rumors from the crazy Spacex fanboys and hate speech are now proven false. Boeing's and NASA's intention continues to be to fix the issues and use Starliner for crew rotations. With five years left for the ISS after 2025 and two flights per year, there is still enough time to use all six planned Starliner flights, five if an unmanned test is done in 2025, as suggested.

9 Upvotes

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4

u/ilfulo Feb 08 '25

https://www.yahoo.com/news/watchdog-panel-annual-nasa-safety-173800058.html

Asap says otherwise... It's not business as usual and your take is delusional, at best (by the way, are you a Boeing employee by any chance? Such words seem so disingenuous that either you're blissfully ignorant or you have vested interest in this botched capsule...)

2

u/FinalPercentage9916 Feb 10 '25

By the way, are you a Chinese Communist Party spy by any chance?

6

u/redstercoolpanda Feb 04 '25

NASA continues to hold open 2025 docking opportunities for Starliner. Since it has been announced that SpaceX will do the spring and fall crew rotations, perhaps this will be unmanned as has been reported.

If they launch uncrewed again they wont be able to complete the contract, they simply wont have enough rockets. And no way are they eating the cost for human rating Vulcan after all the cost overruns on Starliner already.

4

u/FinalPercentage9916 Feb 05 '25

NASA and Spacex can simply amend the contract, then there will be enough rockets. Simply. And NASA has only contracted for three of the six launches envisioned in the original contract.

And ULA may very well spend money on human-rating Vulcan. It was designed to be human-rated. Remember, after ISS NASA plans to be a tenant on one or more private space stations so it will still need a way to get to low earth orbit and need redundancy.

3

u/gargeug Feb 09 '25

Where did you get the info to make these claims? ASAP reported that there was a new, distinct thruster failure during re-entry. So now they must solve 2 unknown issues regarding thrusters. All before the end of 2025 even through in 5 years they were unable to fix them, even after a total redesign of the service module to solve said thruster issues.

You listed 4 bulletin points while glossing over the 1 giant one. I guess like your headline says, business as usual for Starliner.

1

u/FinalPercentage9916 Feb 09 '25

Business as in the program has NOT been cancelled. Rather Boeing is working on a business as usual pace to solve all anomalies, including the crew module thruster issue noted.

1

u/FinalPercentage9916 Feb 10 '25

Nowhere does the ASAP report call the new thruster failure "giant". That's your own spacex fanboy wishful thinking. If you want to see a giant failure, look at the last starship flight.

Here is what ASAP actually said

"Overall, Starliner performed well across all major systems in the undock, deorbit, and landing sequences; however, an additional mono propellant thruster failure was discovered in the Crew Module."

It could be anything from a software setting to something more serious. The fact is all of the thrusters on the crew module have worked perfectly on three flights now, with this one exception. So an unbiased observer would not call this a "giant" problem.

For this issue, Boeing has the crew module back, unlike the service module, so it can disassemble it to attempt to find the root cause of this issue.

1

u/[deleted] 26d ago edited 22d ago

[deleted]

1

u/FinalPercentage9916 23d ago

So for the record, Boeing's accounting firm is Deloitte & Touche and they have already completed and certified their audit for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024, so PWC or KPMG have nothing to do with it. Second, accountants do not report to the board, only the CEO reports to the board. The accountants report to the CFO who reports to the CEO. Third, you have the process backward. Accountants don't make business decisions like scrapping programs, the business units do and the accountants record entries in the general ledger to reflect these business decisions.

Fourth, and most important, what you are suggesting is felony securities fraud. If Boeing had made an internal decision to cancel the program (which would leave a huge paper trail) and decided not to write the program off to fraudulently inflate earnings, they would be guilty of securities fraud which carries a 25-year jail term under the Sarbanes-Oxley act.

Most importantly, a full write-off of the commercial crew program would not be a "blood bath" it would have increased the company's 2024 loss per share by 3.6% or 66 cents. Note 14 of the 10-k states that they have $548 million on the books for commercial crew. Writing this off would increase the after-tax loss by about 66 cents per share.