Starliner Reponendum Est? (Part II): Why Boeing’s Troubled Capsule Still Needs to be Replaced

[Note: I started writing this almost a year ago, but got stalled out. I wanted to finish writing this while it was still potentially relevant.]

I’ll be honest, I was hoping to not have to write the rest of this series. When Boeing’s new CEO started making noises about potentially selling off the parts of Boeing’s Space and Defense division, over a year ago now, I thought this series would be OBE¹, allowing me to focus on funner, less spicy topics. Unfortunately, that so far hasn’t panned out, and in spite of details that emerged about how close of a call this last flight really was, NASA and Boeing started to roll out the beginnings of a plan for certifying Starliner without actually requiring it to successfully fly a complete crew flight test mission…

It was telling that NASA, under the previous administrator, was seriously thinking about “certifying” Starliner, and allowing its next mission to be a “post-certification flight”, while still talking about flying just cargo on-board for the next mission. Basically saying “We’ll do more testing and analyses and paperwork, say that you’re certified so you can bill for the remaining pre-certification milestones, then we’ll pay you something on the order of $320M to fly less cargo than a Dragon, because yeah right, who are we kidding thinking our astronauts would actually trust flying in this thing before it has at least one relatively flawless flight?”

That really felt like desperation on NASA’s part, or Boeing telling NASA that they’ll walk from the program if forced to fly another pre-certification mission on their own dime. Or maybe a bit of both.

The new administrator’s decision to label the CFT mission last year as a Type-A Mishap, and his indictment of how NASA handled this whole fiasco gives me some hope that maybe things will start heading in a reasonable direction. But I still think that almost everyone would be better off if NASA just “shoots the puppy”² and uses the leftover money from canceling Starliner to fund development on a more reliable and more economically competitive replacement.

Why Almost Everyone Would Be Better Off if NASA Terminated Starliner (and Competed a Replacement)

If you think about the various groups that are impacted by NASA’s decision to stay the course with Starliner vs terminating it and replacing it, it’s striking that almost everyone (NASA, Boeing itself, CLD Developers, SpaceX, and even SpaceX’s competitors) would be better off if NASA pulled the plug on Starliner and started work on a replacement.

Why NASA Would Benefit

The main reason NASA hasn’t pulled the plug yet has been because they want assured access to ISS. They don’t want a situation where Dragon or Falcon 9 being grounded means they might have to temporarily abandon their part of the station. I think there’s some merit to the desire for dissimilar redundancy, but the reality is that the redundancy Starliner brings would be both temporary at best and potentially illusory.

First, the redundancy it provides will at best help for only the final few years of ISS operations. There’s many reasons to believe that even if Starliner flies through the end of ISS operations, that it won’t ever fly beyond that:

• Right now, Starliner is designed to fly on Atlas V, which is no longer in production. After they fly the six Atlas V’s set aside for Starliner, they’d have to reintegrate Starliner with a new launch vehicle like Falcon 9 or Vulcan. Unlike Cygnus though, this will likely be a lot more complicated, since Starliner flies on the outside of the rocket instead of in a fairing, which likely means that adapting it to a new launch vehicle will require extensive analyses, testing, and potentially even some major structural redesigns.
• Even without having to cover large NRE expenses to keep it flying post-ISS, Starliner still costs on the order of $320M per mission for four people, yielding a per-seat price that’s well over 50% higher than Dragon. CLD operators are way more cost sensitive than NASA was with ISS. Can any of them actually close their business plans if they have to regularly pay $80M/seat to get people to/from their station? Will they get any customers at that price?

If my hunch is right that Boeing wanted to back out of Starliner if forced to fly another test flight, that suggests how likely they think it is that anyone will buy another flight beyond the ISS missions they already have secured from NASA. Which basically means that once NASA transitions to being a major customer of station services in the CLD Era, they’ll be right back to a situation where they don’t have crew redundancy anymore, because nobody else can afford to keep Starliner on life support.

Second, I think that even if you’re only looking at the final few years of ISS operations, the redundancy value of Starliner is probably illusory at best. If Boeing and its employees and shareholders know that Starliner’s days are numbered, how well will they really support it through the end of operations? Given how much money they’ve lost already, will they really avoid the temptation to start cutting back on the team as soon as they can. Getting rid of or reassigning people who aren’t strictly necessary for operating those last few flights? Won’t their most talented and ambitious employees likely seek work elsewhere? If Dragon actually did have an issue, and they needed to accelerate Starliner’s availability to make up for that, would Boeing actually have the manpower to accelerate its schedule enough to matter? Especially as they’re trying to control costs on a program that has already cost them their shirt?

Finally, independent of arguments about redundancy, NASA would benefit from replacing Starliner because it increases its odds of the CLD facilities being successful, which will allow it to free up more of its resources to focus on beyond earth orbit human spaceflight³. But more on that in a moment.

Why Boeing Would Potentially Benefit

Frankly, Boeing has lost a lot of money on Starliner, and my guess is the only reason they haven’t walked away from it at this point is that NASA is probably putting pressure on them to stay in the game. They have a ton of house-cleaning they need to do to rebuild their capabilities and reputation as a reliable airframe manufacturer, and frankly Starliner is a distraction to that⁴. Honestly, I’m wondering if now that a Type-A Mishap⁵ has been declared, if Boeing isn’t regretting that they didn’t walk away from Starliner sooner. They now have an even worse black eye, and NASA almost certainly isn’t going to be able to let them skate by without properly and convincingly fixing Starliner’s problems. There’s a good chance that working through all of that could take another year of added costs, and cost them the opportunity for at least one Starliner flight to the ISS to offset them.

I’m not an expert in large government contracts⁶, so I’ve been confused about why Boeing hasn’t backed out yet, given how much Starliner continues to cost them. It could be that since they’ve started getting payments for milestones toward their first few operational flights, that backing out might require them to pay those milestones back? Or maybe they’re worried if they quit, it would give them severely negative grades on contract performance⁷? Or maybe NASA was cajoling them in some other way to stick with the program⁸. Maybe it’s something else, but if it is something like having to repay milestones, I think NASA would be better off if they gave Boeing a “golden bridge to retreat across”⁹ by waiving those fees if they walk away now.

CLD Operators

The CLD developers are probably some of the clearest beneficiaries of if Starliner was canceled and recompeted. As discussed in the previous post, CLD business plans live or die on affordable space transportation. They need not just a reliable second provider, but one that is economically competitive with Dragon. Right now NASA wants to scale back its LEO investment post ISS to ~$1B/yr, to free up the remaining ~$3B/yr for Artemis and other beyond LEO activities. If they wanted to keep two CLD providers alive, and they want continuous operations, and they limited crew rotations to six-month stints, Crew Dragon flights would take up almost that entire budget¹⁰. That’s not impossible to wrap a business model around, but very challenging. Having NASA invest in one or two more serious crew providers that are capable of competing with that price point would go a long way to ensuring CLD operators have a fighting chance of success.

And as discussed before, does anyone seriously think Starliner would keep flying beyond ISS? Given that it has proven to be far less reliable than Dragon, and costs almost twice as much per crew seat? And if they did by some miracle keep flying, how much will it cost to requalify Starliner to fly on a new launch vehicle once they run out of AtlasVs? There is practically zero value to the CLD providers to keeping Starliner on life support through the end of ISS. They would be unequivocally better off by having it canceled and replaced with something that actually would be available when they need it, especially if it’s economically competitive with Dragon.

Note, I haven’t said anything about Crew Starship, because in reality I don’t think it’s likely to be any more affordable for CLD operators, at least not without competition. Most of them aren’t building stations that need a dozen crew delivered at a time, and there’s no indication that SpaceX would actually lower their seat prices without real competition¹¹.

SpaceX Competitors

This one is obvious. If Starliner gets canceled and replaced, someone is going to win that contract. There are several up-and-coming launch providers, many of whom have demonstrated more capability than SpaceX had when they won the initial COTS and CRS-1 contracts for Dragon, and a ton of groups developing cargo reentry vehicles that could potentially benefit from a recompete of Boeing’s Commercial Crew slot. With Falcon 9 being retired in favor of Starship, this would also likely lead to launches for whichever of the up-and-coming medium lift vehicles shows the most promise.

SpaceX

SpaceX would be an obvious beneficiary as well. Starting a new commercial crew provider from today would mean that NASA would likely need to tap Crew Dragon for the remaining ISS flights¹², which would likely be another $800M-1B in revenue.

While a world where Crew Dragon or Crew Starship have real competition would mean lower margins per flight, a more successful CLD market is one that’s more likely to grow to the point where it could start using Starship services in the future. Also, a more successful CLD market is one that increases the odds of NASA being able to shift more resources from ISS to beyond-LEO human spaceflight, of which SpaceX would likely be a major beneficiary. Finally, a commercial LEO marketplace that is solid and growing probably helps make all of SpaceX’s long-term visions easier to execute — LEO Data Centers, Lunar settlement and ISRU mining, and large Mars missions are all easier to make happen if there’s a thriving LEO ecosystem that’s not 100% dependent on what SpaceX is spending money on.

There Are A Few Who Wouldn’t Be Better Off Though…

The group that loses out the most from Starliner going away is going to be Boeing’s Starliner employees, many of who would likely be at least temporarily out of a job if Starliner went away. This to me is sad, because frankly most of the worst issues with Starliner were driven by management decisions, not by the rank and file engineers. They did their best to try and solve problems within the constraints of a publicly traded engineering company that was driven by people at the top who only really knew how to do financial engineering. Many of these employees had good paying, stable jobs, with good work/life balance. Losing that is a real loss for them, and potentially their communities, and shouldn’t be glossed over, even if canceling Starliner would be the right decision for the industry.

There’s a chance ULA might be worse off as well, if they’re not able to repurpose and resell those remaining Atlas V tail numbers that were earmarked for Starliner.

The Precedent of the COTS RpK Cancellation and the Importance of “Opportunity Costs”

Pulling the plug on a non-performing commercial services provider is not without precedent. The initial COTS program selected SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler to develop commercial cargo delivery solutions for station. RpK’s solution was more ambitious than SpaceX’s¹³, but was tied to a development approach that was way more expensive, and ultimately they were unable to raise the money needed for some of the financial milestones in their COTS Space Act Agreement. They did renegotiate milestones a few times, but they were never able to close the funding. Rather than keep RpK on the hook forever in the hopes of funding eventually coming in, or restructuring the contract in some way to give them additional help by say frontloading payment milestones or something like that, NASA decided to pull the plug on the contract in September of 2006. And they recompeted the slot, to get another commercial cargo provider — ultimately resulting in the Cygnus cargo vehicle, which provided NASA with a reliable, and reasonably affordable cargo system to go along with Cargo Dragon.

Canceling the RpK contract, and recompeting it was probably one of the smartest moves NASA made in the COTS program. It showed that there were consequences for not delivering. It gave another provider a chance to replace them, resulting in two reliable and reasonably affordable¹⁴ cargo providers. One of the best incentives to execute well is knowing you can be “fired for incompetence”¹⁵.

Opportunity Costs are Real Costs

Much like with the current situation with Starliner, in theory, NASA could’ve said that the RpK contract was a firm-fixed price contract, so there was no cost to NASA if they continued to give RpK time to try and make something happen. But the reality is that there’s a huge opportunity cost¹⁶ to leaving a non-delivering provider on contract like this, rather than cutting them off after they’ve had a reasonable chance to remedy things. Had NASA taken that “it doesn’t cost us anything to do nothing” approach with COTS, they almost certainly would’ve only ended up with Dragon as a commercial cargo provider, much like the situation we’re likely to see if they keep Boeing’s Starliner on life support. But more than that, the opportunity cost of not canceling RpK and recompeting includes not getting the Cygnus cargo vehicle¹⁷, or the Antares family of launch vehicles including the new Eclipse launch vehicle¹⁸ that’s about to have its debut flight. The opportunity cost would’ve likely included the ability to launch cubesats from the ISS before smallsat dedicated launch and eventually SpaceX rideshare came online¹⁹. Without those rides, would Planet Lab and Spire have been able to make it as companies? Without Cygnus, would Thales Alenia still have an active line building space station pressure vessels? There are a ton of things that wouldn’t have happened if NASA had chosen inaction on RpK. We can only really see most of those because NASA didn’t sit on its hands. What opportunity costs are we paying for NASA not terminating and recompeting the Starliner contract?

Basically, getting rid of non-performers frees up resources to shift them to more competent organizations, and also puts people on warning that there are real consequences to not delivering²⁰.

But Isn’t It Too Late To Pull the Plug?

It’s true that the best time to pull the plug probably would’ve been right after the CFT debacle over a year ago. Or maybe even before then. But even with the ISS potentially retiring in 2030, it isn’t too late, because frankly the Commercial Crew program was never just about meeting NASA’s needs with ISS. Sure, it’s highly unlikely at this point that they could recompete the contract, get someone spooled up, and have them get all the way through development, NASA’s crew certification process²¹, and flight demonstrations before 2030. But as mentioned before, while NASA isn’t operating the CLD stations, its ability to shift resources and its focus to Artemis is strongly correlated with how successful the CLD stations are.

The best time to pull the plug on Starliner was over a year ago, the next best time is now.

[Next up: Considerations for how to recompete the Commercial Crew contract, who might be potential competitors, and other valuable lessons learned from other programs. Hopefully this last one won’t take as long for me to get around to writing.]

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Jonathan Goff

Director of Advanced Concepts at Gravitics, Inc.

Jonathan Goff is a space technologist, inventor, and serial space entrepreneur who created the Selenian Boondocks blog. Jon was a co-founder of Masten Space Systems, and the founder and CEO of Altius Space Machines, a space robotics startup that he sold to Voyager Space in 2019. Jonathan is currently the Director of Advanced Concepts for the space station startup Gravitics. His family includes his wife, Tiffany, and five boys: Jarom (deceased), Jonathan, James, Peter, and Andrew. Jon has a BS in Manufacturing Engineering (1999) and an MS in Mechanical Engineering (2007) from Brigham Young University, and served an LDS proselytizing mission in Olongapo, Philippines from 2000-2002.

Latest posts by Jonathan Goff (see all)

• RLV Markets VII: Four Models for Commercializing Reusable Launch - July 25, 2026
• Happenings Elsewhere In the Goffosphere - June 6, 2026
• Starliner Reponendum Est? (Part II): Why Boeing’s Troubled Capsule Still Needs to be Replaced - March 4, 2026

1. Overcome By Events, i.e., the series would no longer be relevant because either Boeing or NASA would’ve been smart enough to call it quits on Starliner…
2. A story for another time, but it was a colorful metaphor a mentor of mine used for making a painful but merciful decision.
3. In some ways the situation Chris Shank noted (referenced in the previous blog post in this series) hasn’t really changed. NASA can only really afford to move beyond LEO if it’s left CLD operators in a state where they can grow beyond NASA as an anchor tenant. That requires affordable crew and cargo transportation.
4. Boeing probably wouldn’t have been trying to sell off their space division of they thought it wasn’t a distraction.
5. The most serious classification of accident NASA has
6. The biggest one I’ve ever been involved with so far is a $60M STRATFI demo my company is in the final stages of negotiating with the Space Force
7. With the Type-A mishap declaration, that ship has probably already sailed
8. Most people don’t realize that the main reason LM bid Atlas V for the EELV competition, rather than walk away from it was that the AF in no uncertain terms hinted that if they didn’t bid on it, it could negatively impact some of the major fighter jet programs they had recently won. I don’t know if NASA applied any pressure, but given how much other work Boeing does with NASA, the leverage would be there if needed.
9. A euphemism from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War about allowing an opponent an opening to quit while saving face. Not that Boeing is an opponent, but that sometimes its worth giving another party a more than fair deal to get them to do what’s in everyone’s best interest.
10. I’ve heard the going price for a Crew Dragon mission is somewhere in the $160-200M range. Multipled by two CLD stations, each needing 2x crew rotations per year, that’s $640-800M/yr, or 60-80% of the amount NASA wants to chip in as an anchor tenant
11. The numbers I had heard for Crew Starship are a few years out of date, but they weren’t noticeably better than the per seat price of Dragon — SpaceX is, understandbly, pricing at what they think the market will bear, since they don’t have any real competition
12. At least until say 2030, possibly through 2032 if Congress really has NASA stretch ISS out that long
13. Involving the development of a 10ton to LEO two-stage fully-reusable launch vehicle, the Kistler K-1. Rocketplane became involved because Kistler had gone bankrupt and Rocketplane, a suborbital RLV developer, had bought them out of bankruptcy to pursue the COTS program and get into bigger, more lucrative markets.
14. At least in terms of ISS logistics. I still think both of them are way to expensive in $/kg for CLD operators
15. A term I got from a friend’s wife when she explained what it meant that she had taught at the university for over a decade without tenure. She said “it means they can fire me for incompetence whenever they want”. The phrase stuck with me.
16. Opportunity Cost is an economics term that means the potential benefit, profit, or value of the next-best option that was forgone when making a specific choice, including the choice not to take an action.
17. Which has been a good cargo vehicle in its own right, but also has probably kept competitive pressure on Cargo Dragon that would otherwise not have existed had they been a monopoly
18. Ok, most of those launch vehicles have been somewhat mid, but Eclipse has the potential of becoming a Falcon 9 competitor, complete with first stage reuse.
19. There were a few years before Electron and then Transporter came on line, where most cubesats that made it to orbit made it to orbit via ISS, with a lot of those enabled by having a second cargo provider. It was a pretty critical stopgap that allowed that industry to not stall out, and also was a key part of what enabled Nanoracks to pursue projects like the Bishop Airlock, and eventually the StarLab CLD facility
20. To be honest, even SpaceX probably needs to be reminded that it needs to get its act together with Starship for HLS. And don’t even get me started again on SLS…
21. I’ll be honest, given how badly it failed to prevent Starliner from being a total debacle, I’m highly unconvinced about the net value of NASA’s crew certification process.