NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago. //

Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair. //

So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers. //

The problem is that while a company might do something that unlocks a payment, the underlying work may not actually be complete. It's a bit like students copying homework assignments throughout the semester. They get good grades but haven't done all of the learning necessary to understand the material. This is only discovered during a final exam in class. Essentially, then, Boeing kept carrying technical debt forward so that additional work was lumped onto the final milestones.

Ultimately, the flight software team faced a reckoning during the initial test flight of Starliner in December 2019. //

The bottom line is that Boeing technically earned the flight software milestones in its commercial crew contract. But by not putting in the work for an end-to-end test of its software, the company failed its final exam. As a result, Boeing had to take the disastrously expensive step of flying a second uncrewed flight test, which it did in May 2022. //

All of Boeing's struggles with Starliner played out against a much larger backdrop of the company's misfortunes with its aviation business. Most notably, in October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes of the company's relatively new jet, the 737 MAX 8, killed 346 people. The jets were grounded for many months.

The institutional failures that led to these twin tragedies are well explained in a book by Peter Robison, Flying Blind. Robison covered Boeing as a reporter during its merger with McDonnell Douglas a quarter of a century ago and described how countless trends since then—stock buybacks, a focus on profits over research and development, importing leadership from McDonnell Douglas, moving away from engineers in key positions to MBAs, and much more led to Boeing's downfall.

It's estimated that, in addition to paying customers and the families of victims, the grounding of the 737 Max for nearly two years cost Boeing $20 billion since 2019. This critical loss of cash came just as Boeing's space division faced crunch time to complete work on Starliner.

There were so many other challenging issues, as well. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 occurred when Boeing was dealing with the fallout from all the software issues on Starliner's debut flight. Additionally, the pandemic accelerated the retirement of experienced engineers who had brought spaceflight experience from the shuttle program. Boeing's best people were focused on the aircraft crisis, and the experienced space hands were leaving.

So it was all a pretty titanic struggle. //

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the strain of operating in a fixed-price environment was the fundamental cause of many of Boeing's struggles with Starliner and similar government procurement programs—so much so that the company's Defense, Space, & Security division is unlikely to participate in fixed-price competitions any longer. In 2023, the company's chief executive said Boeing would "never do them again."

A Boeing spokesperson pushed back on the idea that the company would no longer compete for fixed-price contracts. However, the company believes such contracts must be used correctly, for mature products.

"Challenges arise when the fixed price acquisition approach is applied to serious technology development requirements, or when the requirements are not firmly and specifically defined resulting in trades that continue back and forth before a final design baseline is established," the spokesperson said. "A fixed price contract offers little flexibility for solving hard problems that are common in new product and capability development.". //

The surprise is not that Boeing lost to a more nimble competitor in the commercial space race. The surprise is that this lumbering company made it at all. For that, we should celebrate Starliner’s impending launch and the thousands of engineers and technicians who made it happen. ///

Except it still hasn't succeeded