Boeing Starliner woes deepen with over $2 billion in losses

Boeing continues to bleed money on its troubled Starliner spacecraft, which left two NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for months last year.

The aerospace company lost more than half a billion dollars on the CST-100 Starliner program in 2024, according to its 10-K annual filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 3rd.

Boeing said it took $523 million in charges on Starliner last year, which exceeds an earlier record of $489 million reported in 2019, and brings the total losses on Starliner to just over $2 billion.

“Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods,” the company said in the SEC filing. The latest charges primarily reflected “schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs,” as well as “higher costs for post-certification missions,” it said.

Boeing also noted in the filing that its space and defense business faces strong competition from companies like Lockheed Martin Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and SpaceX, all of which are also NASA contractors.

Non-American companies such as UK-based BAE Systems and the pan-European Airbus Group were also building “strategic presence” in the US, it said, adding that it expects the trend of “strong competition” to continue in 2025.

Boeing has not publicly discussed when Starliner would fly again, and the program was not addressed during the company’s earnings call on January 28th, according to a report by Spacenews.

NASA said there was “significant progress” on some of the Starliner’s issues, but the thruster problems that forced the return of the spacecraft from the ISS uncrewed remain unresolved.

Starliner astronauts still stranded on ISS

The Starliner spacecraft carried two American astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the ISS in June last year for what was supposed to be a ten-day stay. However, it has now stretched to eight months after Starliner had to return to Earth without them.

There are plans to bring the astronauts home by the end of March, with NASA insisting they are not “stranded,” a term nonetheless frequently used to describe the situation, most recently by President Donald Trump.

NASA will use the Space X Crew Dragon capsule to bring Wilmore and Williams back. It was originally planned for February, but has been pushed back as SpaceX needed more time to prepare.

The Starliner fiasco added to a series of difficulties faced by Boeing in recent years, including safety concerns surrounding its 737 Max plane, cyberattacks, and a worker strike that cost the company billions of dollars.