This could be done in weeks.

I hope there is a big culture change at Boeing for the B-47 program.

I don’t think your respective takes are really all that different. And both track pretty well with mine. Especially the matter of some other company taking Starliner off of Boeing’s hands and converting said sow’s ear to at least a nice nylon purse.

In a comment I posted some time ago – whether here or over at The Space Review I no longer recall – I spitballed the idea of Tom Mueller’s Impulse Space taking over Starliner. Impulse is, among other things, a competent designer and builder of attitude control thrusters and its CEO, Mueller, is also a car racer. So the idea of Starliner, instead of some car, being the vehicle in a backroom garage somewhere being worked over and rebuilt, hot rod-like, had a certain humorous appeal.

NASA might want it to go faster, or NASA might not care, but it will be entirely up to Boeing’s management how quickly things get done.

That is *legally* true. Politically, though…there are scenarios where Boeing could be pushed harder.

Of course, that comes at a price.

Imagine a scenario where Boeing had (God help us) actually succeeded in forcing a downselect to just Starliner in 2014. It does not take much imagination to project an inevitable trendline of Boeing finding ways over the succeeding years in converting the fixed cost contract into something looking more and more like a cost-plus contract. It would have maximum leverage over NASA.

Without Dragon out there, that would have left NASA in an increasingly awkward place, as the delays mounted. At some point, possibly even before February 2022, reliance on Russian transport to ISS becomes intolerable. The pressure would be on both NASA and Boeing to get Starliner operational. It would, of course, take more money. It would probably also see NASA accepting higher risk levels to make it happen. One could see Starliner getting into service sooner in this scenario. It would probably still be somewhat of a lemon even with a few billion extra in taxpayer dollars. It’s also possible that Starliner ends up killing astronauts, in which case ISS would be completely untenable.

But in our timeline…. Boeing plods along with Starliner fixes, and NASA does not seem willing to exert that sort of pressure. They seem unwilling to terminate the program, and they seem unwilling to lean hard on Boeing to move faster. Maybe it’s just one more decision that’s been punted to the new administration to sort out.

In any event, I was only attempting an exercise in thinking through what value Starliner *could* have, and giving it every benefit of the doubt for argument’s sake (because I would just as soon kill it at this point). But increasingly, I think that future could only be realized if a more competent space company took it over. I don’t think much of Boeing is salvageable at this point.

Richard M: Your analysis, while thoughtful, I think is making a fundamental error. This is a fixed-price contract with Boeing, who is entirely in charge of the pace of operations. NASA might want it to go faster, or NASA might not care, but it will be entirely up to Boeing’s management how quickly things get done.

So far Boeing’s management in this whole project has shown itself to be very subpar. They allow numerous mistakes — some blatantly absurd like the use of flammable tape in the capsule — while applying no pressure on anyone to move things along. At the pace the company is setting, Starliner won’t really be operational until the last two or three years of ISS’s life, when there will be hardly any flights left for NASA to buy.

NASA meanwhile appears to so far be all-in on fostering a vibrant commercial space industry, as demonstrated by its continuing support of the lunar lander program. Its problem is that too many of America’s aerospace companies are like Boeing, bloated, slow, inefficient, and badly run. The hope is to get the new companies going to replace these dinosaurs.

If past such estimates are any guide, these new estimates of a late 2025 or early 2026 next Starliner flight – with or without crew TBD – can probably be safely marked up by at least a year.

I feel like summer 2026 is a minimum NET date at this point, honestly. Probably, an optimistic one!

NASA certainly….does not seem to be in a hurry to bring Starliner online, do they? Obviously, having a reliable, large and growing Dragon fleet takes a lot of the pressure off.

And honestly, I think they share the growing sense that the advantage of having Starliner in operation is quite marginal for NASA. They don’t need it for price competition — it was always more expensive, and anyway NASA has bought all the Dragon flights it could need for ISS’s lifetime. Nor does it prove much redundancy value, either.

So what would a steelman case for Starliner look like now? The one obvious thing I can think of is that, if NASA really does mean to strongly push a vibrant economy in low earth orbit, one that includes multiple western space stations, then there could be an accelerant effect on capital and customers if there ends up being two American crew vehicles to reach these facilities, even if one is demonstrably inferior to the other. And maybe Starliner will be in someone else’s hands by then, too — someone able to iterate it into something more effective. In short, it may have most of what value it could have for the LEO economy that comes after ISS, rather than ISS itself.

Not saying I am fully persuaded, but it is something I think about.

(In my humble, and cynical opinion).

And I also wouldn’t be surprised if Finke wanted to make sure he could fly more than one last time.