Boeing provides for additional losses for the Starliner in the fourth quarter

Washington-Boeing says it expects to undergo additional losses on its CSS-100 Starliner commercial crew program when it will publish its fourth quarter financial results next week.

In a press release on January 23, Boeing provided its preliminary results for the fourth quarter of 2024. This included a projection of $ 1.7 billion in profits for five programs in its Defense, Espace and Security commercial unit.

Most of these expenses will be assigned to two programs: $ 800 million for the KC-46A supply and $ 500 million for the T-7A training aircraft. This leaves $ 400 million in fees for Starliner as well as for the VC-25B presidential plane and the MQ-25 drone.

Boeing gave similar forecasts for its third quarter results in October, initially warning of $ 2 billion in fees, of which $ 1.6 billion would be intended for KC-46A and T-7A. The company then declared charges of $ 250 million on Starliner in the third quarter.

Boeing has not provided additional details on the expected charges on profits. The company is expected to publish its fourth quarter financial results on January 28.

Boeing and NASA offered few updates on Starliner’s status shortly after the return of the spaceship on earth without crew in September to finish the test mission with crew. NASA has chosen to keep the astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched Starliner in June, on the station, citing concerns about the performance of the propellants who misunderstood during the trip to the spaceship to the station. Starliner landed safely at White Sands, New Mexico.

In October, NASA announced that it was postponing the first Starliner operational mission beyond 2025, choosing to use the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft for the CREW-10 mission, which will now be launched towards the ISS in March , and for Crew-11 at the end of the summer.

“The calendar and the configuration of the next Starliner flight will be determined once a better understanding of the path traveled by Boeing towards the certification of the system will be established,” NASA said. “NASA keeps options on the table on the best way to obtain the system certification, including opportunity windows for a possible Starliner flight in 2025.” The agency has not provided updates on Starliner’s status since then.

Boeing has not provided any updates since he declared during his last conference call in October that he studied means to rationalize his activities, which could imply the cessation of work in certain areas in outside of commercial aviation and defense. Kelly Ortberg, Director General of Boeing, had then declared that “there are probably certain marginal things with which we can be more effective or that simply divert us from our main objectives”.

In a report published on January 23, the venture capital company Space Capital predicted that Boeing and Airbus would give in their space divisions this year. The report indicated that the transfers, if they occurred, would mark “a pivotal moment in the space economy” by upsetting the industry, creating “new opportunities and new risks in the extensive capacities of the government in space”.

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