CHICAGO: After a humiliating setback to its space ambitions, Boeing Co faces a dilemma that pits its national duty against strained cash reserves.

The decision about the future of the struggling Starliner programme now rests with Boeing’s newly installed chief executive officer, Kelly Ortberg, after Nasa announced that it wouldn’t send astronauts home from the space station on the faulty spacecraft.

Following weeks of testing and heated debate, the space agency decided it was safer to use Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The spectre of Nasa astronauts being stuck in space is just one embarrassing moment of many for Boeing during an epically bad year that’s included a near-catastrophic blowout on an airborne 737 Max jetliner, federal investigations and an executive suite shake-up.

That leaves Ortberg, who took over the top job earlier this month, and the senior leadership council known internally as the “exco,” to face thorny questions about the company’s commitment to human spaceflight and Starliner.

Before Ortberg joined Boeing, executives had vowed to honour the company’s contract to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa.

Bill Nelson, the agency’s top leader, said Ortberg recently voiced support for continuing the Starliner programme after the craft is sent back from the space station without people on board.

“He expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and that we will have our redundancy and our crewed access to the space station,” the Nasa administrator told reporters last Saturday.

But as a new leader brought in to get Boeing back on track after years of turmoil, Ortberg has free reign to make sweeping changes and unpopular calls, including potentially scuttling the human spaceflight initiative.

“Do they ultimately exit the programme because it’s too complicated and Boeing can’t recover its investment because the other guy can do it better?” said Robert Spingarn, an analyst with Melius Research. “It could happen.”

Much will depend on how Starliner performs during its return flight to Earth without astronauts on board next month. Nasa hasn’t ruled out certifying the Boeing craft, although it could require another test flight before the capsule is allowed to carry astronauts again.

That could cost Boeing about US$400mil, based on charges the company booked to redo an earlier test flight. The agency’s experts still aren’t certain why the thrusters suddenly stopped working.

Boeing’s strained balance sheet and an expected cash burn of at least US$5bil this year are considerations the company has to weigh against its legacy in space, which dates back to the Apollo moon-landing programme.

After recording some US$1.6bil in cost overruns, the struggling aerospace giant seems unlikely to ever make money on Starliner.

In a July filing, the company disclosed US$125mil in new losses stemming from delays to the crewed flight test and testing of Starliner’s glitchy propulsion systems.

“For Boeing, the losses are significant and would call into question the viability of a business like this if you look at it in a long-term way,” said Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Starliner is one of several fixed-price contracts dragging on the profits in Boeing’s defence and space division, which posted a US$762mil operating loss during the first six months of 2024, slightly worse than a year earlier.

The stumbles at a business that was once reliably profitable is likely a pressing concern for Boeing’s new chief executive.

“I think it’s really important for him to go in and have an assessment of this,” said Douglas Harned, an aerospace analyst with Bernstein.

“He’s coming in with a clean slate.”

 - Bloomberg