Boeing Should Dump Spaceships to Focus on Airplanes
The company needs to fix its commercial aircraft business, and a pure-play venture could compete better with SpaceX.
Failure to launch.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
It wasn’t a surprise that Boeing Co.’s launch of its CST-100 Starliner capsule was postponed on Saturday. It would have been the company’s first mission carrying astronauts to the the International Space Station since NASA awarded contracts in 2014 to Boeing and startup SpaceX to do the job. Boeing has been plagued with delays and numerous missteps since it took up the challenge to wean US dependence on Russia to ferry NASA crews and equipment to the space station.
With less than four minutes left in the countdown, the mission was aborted after a redundant computer check flagged a potential problem. The capsule, which will carry two astronauts, could launch as soon as Wednesday. Even if Starliner, which rides atop Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Atlas V rocket, takes off and reaches the station, it would hardly be a roaring success. Boeing’s partnership with Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, is about seven years behind on its first crewed mission, and the Atlas V is a cargo rocket that’s at the end of its useful life. It’s hard to tell how much cash Boeing’s space business is burning because it’s tucked under its money-losing defense unit, but it’s a problem the company can’t afford.
Boeing should carve out its space business and combine it with a bold, entrepreneurial space company (with the backing of deep-pocketed venture capital firms whose principals dream about going to space). The unit desperately needs a shake-up to compete and can no longer rest on the laurels of its heyday when the Saturn rocket powered the Apollo missions to the moon. The goal should be to match SpaceX’s success and help drive down the cost of space launches as NASA seeks to put people on Mars with the moon as a way station.