Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

Actually, a multiple award approach for a very high risk, technically challenging widget makes perfect sense, and is the same thing seen for similarly challenging weapon systems e.g. the Advanced Tactical Fighter F-22 vs F-23 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/americas-f-23-ste...

> The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.

This looks like Boeing was doing some horse trading that could have been pretty financially risky particularly considering the value of money.

> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.

Sometimes when thinking about the Industrial Base of the United States, there is a good rationale for keeping an incumbent's design & engineering capabilities active, while bringing competition to the table and potentially displacing it with a more agile competitor.

If truly getting the best and most efficient designs out there was the true goal, there should have been more awards, and for funded development to enable a greater diversity of competitors with designs being put forth.

There is some pretty horrific anti-Boeing spin.

> Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time.

> Asked whether Starliner might be able to launch this year, Stich did not offer a concrete timetable. "We're not really ready to talk about a launch opportunity yet," he said. "We're going to work the technical issues first, and then we'll sit down with the Boeing team when the time is right and pick a launch target."

Reasonable and responsible as a response. However, Ars spins that response into:

> Such an answer suggests that Starliner's launch on an Atlas V rocket ... may very well slip into 2024.

I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!"

But even that is not enough: Ars doubles down, and now NASA's refusal to provide a concrete updated launch date means not only is it "[slipping] into 2024", but apparently almost to 2025:

> Given the ongoing delays, it is now possible that Crew-9 flies next fall, before Boeing's first operational mission, Starliner-1.

Which is hilarious (ambiguity about launches) as NASA doesn't even know when in 2024 (except that it will be at least Spring) Crew-EIGHT will launch... (and neither NASA nor SpaceX itself has made any communication on Crew-9 launch timeframes.)

All 100% speculation. The "ongoing delays" in this context are "in June, Boeing announced that it would push back the July launch".

I also question Ars' framing of this as "losing money"... it's R&D expenditures.

Ars (and its Space editor, Eric Berger, who has written books about SpaceX) are pretty heavy proponents of SpaceX (which I generally am too, despite being less enthusiastic about its leader), and this article just reeks of subjective opinion, more so than objective neutrality.

There lots of more relevant and important technologies that need more funding.

The CommercialCrew program was not done for research, it was trying to solving a particular problem at the time and do it fast and efficently.

If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do it.