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December 20, 2019 Boeing (NYSE: BA) overturned one of his most important missions.
The test flight in question aimed to send an unmanned CST-100 “Starliner” spacecraft to the International Space Station and vice versa, laying the groundwork for a manned mission to bring honest astronauts to goodness to the ISS earlier this year.
Unfortunately, a computer glitch on the spacecraft failed to start Starliner’s engines at the right time. As a result, Starliner never made it to the ISS, and had to ignominiously return to earth on Earth, his mission was largely a failure. For months afterward, Boeing negotiated with NASA, arguing over and over again whether the company should be allowed to continue on a manned mission in the hope that having astronauts on board this time will prevent it from happening again. Ultimately, however, NASA decided that Boeing would have to redo its initial test flight and demonstrate that its spacecraft is capable of flying automatically without failure.
Last week, Boeing finally agreed. At a cost of $ 410 million, it will reward the “Orbital Flight Test” without crew, probably in October or November of this year.
So what does this mean now for Boeing and for SpaceX, its archrival in space flight?
Image source: SpaceX.
SpaceX wins
Except for some unforeseen event, it means that SpaceX is going to win the “race to space” against Boeing.
You see, NASA also asked SpaceX to first run an unmanned mission to the ISS, to make sure their equipment was working properly, and then to proceed with a manned mission. On March 2, 2019, SpaceX accomplished the first half of this plan seamlessly, flying a Crew Dragon space capsule to the ISS on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, successfully docking with the space station, and then, 27 hours later, returning to the earth.
Subsequently, SpaceX ran into difficulties, especially an April 20 “anomaly” that destroyed its first test vehicle in an explosion during an engine test, but there were other problems, too. The fact is, if none of that had happened, SpaceX probably would have already sent astronauts to the ISS once or twice. But with most of the technical issues presumably fixed today, SpaceX looks like all systems are going to attempt their first launch of a manned spacecraft, sometime, probably next month.
According to SpaceflightNow.com space observers, SpaceX plans to fly its “Demo-2” Crew Dragon mission in late May, taking NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station and then returning to Earth. under remote control after depositing them there for their tasks.
If everything goes as planned, SpaceX will be written in history books as the first privately owned space company to send humans into orbit, and the company that gave NASA back the ability to launch American astronauts into space from U.S. territory. .
As for Boeing, however, even if its unmanned Starliner mission shoots up smoothly later this year, and even if it continues a successful manned mission, Boeing will always be second for SpaceX.
SpaceX wins, Boeing loses … profits?
Place pride isn’t the only thing Boeing could lose if SpaceX outperforms ISS again. When NASA originally awarded “commercial crew” contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, it promised to pay SpaceX $ 2.6 billion to execute “at least two and up to six manned missions on the space station,” but promised to pay Boeing $ 4.2. billion do exactly the same.
Presumably, NASA paid Boeing a premium because of its hard-earned reputation as one of the American space companies (along with Lockheed Martin), and about half of the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture, the United Launch Alliance, which has successfully launched 138 straight rockets into orbit without suffering a single failure. (Even on the failed Starliner mission in December 2019, it was only the Boeing spacecraft that did not work properly. The ULA Atlas V rocket launched by the spacecraft worked perfectly.) Back then, SpaceX was the unknown quantity, and Boeing the suspected space flight expert – an expert worth paying a premium for, to ensure that at least one spacecraft can accomplish the mission.
Now, however, if SpaceX ends up beating Boeing to ISS not just once, but twice, both on its unmanned and crew missions, the case for paying higher prices than Boeing for doing the same job as SpaceX. is doing could fail. In the future, Boeing may be forced to compete much more with SpaceX on the price of missions, and it may not rely so much on its reputation to justify the price of its missions at a higher price. One has to imagine that the loss of its ability to charge higher prices will show up in the company’s income statement in the form of reduced profit margins.
Long story short: May could be a brilliant month for SpaceX. It could also mark a decline in the profitability of Boeing’s space division, and the beginning of the end for Boeing’s reputation as America’s leading space company.
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