Boeing Starliner official talks pros and cons of NASA contracts

Boeing executive Mark Nappi had been the face of the company’s Starliner program during its beleaguered Crew Flight Test to the International Space Station that ultimately left its crew of two NASA astronauts behind when the spacecraft returned to Earth last year.

After NASA made the call to keep its astronauts safe on the ISS because of concerns about Starliner’s thrusters, Nappi was noticeably missing from press conference updates as the spacecraft made what turned out to be a safe return in September, albeit minus crew.

Now 64, Nappi announced he was retiring from Boeing this year, but he talked about the challenges of public-private partnerships such as Boeing’s with NASA on the Starliner project during a panel session at last week’s commercial space conference SpaceCom at the Orange County Convention Center.

When asked about the hurdles of transparency, Nappi said. “It’s like your parents used to tell you, you know? If you tell a lie, you’re just going to have to tell more and more and more and more before it’s all said and done, and eventually the truth will come out.”

“It’s just true in our business as well,” he added. “You’ve got to be transparent, you have to be direct. You have to be able to tell what’s going on.”

That has included revealing the challenges over the years within the Starliner program that were aired publicly ever since Boeing won a contract to develop a spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon back in 2014.

Both companies initially had targets as early as 2017 for their first crewed test flights for the spacecraft designed to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS and end the U.S. reliance on the Russian launches of Soyuz spacecraft. Both faced development delays, though.

SpaceX was eventually able to perform its crewed test flight Demo-2 in May 2020, and has since flown its fleet of four Crew Dragon a total of 15 times, carrying 56 humans into space.

Boeing fell behind with issues on two uncrewed test flights, including the first in 2019, OFT-1, that missed its rendezvous with the ISS entirely because of software and communication issues. A post-flight review of that mission that NASA referred to as a “high visibility close call” led to 80 changes to the program. More delays plagued the eventual launch of OFT-2, which flew in 2022, but two and a half years after the first try.

It was then more than two years after that, and more than four years behind SpaceX, that Boeing was able to finally launch its crewed flight test mission.

That flight with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore launched on June 5, 2024 aboard Starliner atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V, but issues with helium leaks and thruster failures on its way to docking with the ISS turned what was supposed to be as little as an eight-day mission to the ISS into a months-long back-and-forth with NASA on whether or not the risk was worth sending Wilmore and Williams back home.

Boeing at one point put out a press release detailing the level of modeling and testing it had done to suggest it was safe to fly the astronauts home. But soon after it was revealed, there was dissent among NASA officials.

“There’s positions that you get put in sometimes where you’re at odds with your customer or with your partner, and that’s when it gets tough to be transparent, because you don’t want to look like you’re at odds with each other whether in public or in the press,” Nappi said. “So that’s a challenge that you kind of have to navigate through.”

In the end, Williams and Wilmore remained on board the ISS with Starliner making it home safe without them. The duo remain on board the station with NASA instead altering the SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the ISS to fly up only two instead of four astronauts leaving space for the Starliner astronauts to ride home in 2025.

That return flight has actually been delayed from what had planned to be this month because SpaceX has yet to complete its fifth Crew Dragon spacecraft that was originally tapped to make the Crew-10 flight.

That mission is now slated for no earlier than late March, meaning Williams and Wilmore would likely have to wait until it arrives before they can fly home on Crew-9 after a few days during which the two crews are on station at the same time. An early April return flight home means the duo will have spent more than eight months on board the station.

Despite Boeing losing face in its efforts to complete a successful Starliner crewed test flight, the mission is still under review with NASA and it could potentially still achieve certification this year, although any new version of Starliner would require fixes to the helium and thruster issues. NASA has officially lined up SpaceX to fly a summer Crew-11 mission to the ISS meaning the first Starliner flight would not be able to fly until at least late 2025.

Boeing itself had a rough year with layoffs that hit its space operations in Florida, but it still has contracts to complete the Starliner program and fly up to six rotational missions to the ISS before the space station ends operations after 2030.

Boeing also is the main contractor for the core stages of the Space Launch System rocket used in the Artemis program, while also supporting orbital operations of the ISS, and having a 50% stake in United Launch Alliance, and developing satellites as well.

From Nappi’s perspective, the public-private partnerships have been beneficial to the company, even with the bumps in the road.

“I’ve been lucky I’ve had really, really good customers that we’ve been able to go in and partner with even if we did disagree,” he said. “We’ve been able to go in and partner and be able to talk about the issue at hand in a civilized way.”

Nappi gave his views on the state of Starliner and where the Commercial Crew Program got its start, noting that Boeing had worked on plans in the 1990s and early 2000s on ways the Space Shuttle Program could be privatized with commercial companies taking over space shuttle flights.

“It never took off. It was a good idea before its time, but we ended up implementing those characteristics of that plan with where we are today,” he said. “So we ended up doing it. It just took a while, and it took more experience, and it took better thinking.”

He also said the public-private partnership model could use more flexibility.

“When you’re working under a cost-type contract, and the government wants you to do it this way, you could offer ideas, but when they want to do it this way, you do it this way, and it doesn’t matter how much it costs,” he said.

He said both Boeing and SpaceX were in agreement that government requirements in the Commercial Crew Program could have been more efficient.

“When we’re spending our money, we want to find the best way to do it, and that’s what we need to be able to figure out,” he said.

When government works closely with commercial companies, it has shown it can reap benefits, he said.

“The key to success, though, is really leveraging off of our strengths. We all have strengths, and we all have weaknesses. Let’s not let the weaknesses get in the way of the other guy’s strengths,” he said.

“The government has resources. The government has smart people. We have a way a lot of times in private companies by doing things faster. We’re able to get things on contract. We’re able to move a little quicker than the government is. So let’s kind of stay in our swim lanes, and if we can, we’ll get things done pretty quick.”

Despite Starliner and the SLS programs taking years longer and costing the government billions more than originally planned, Nappi tempered those criticisms by looking at where Kennedy Space Center has become since the end of the Space Shuttle Program.

“There’s some that aren’t as successful as others. Let’s learn from the ones that we’re not as successful with, and take really good lessons learned from the ones that we have been successful with and push this thing forward,” he said. “Because today, KSC is a multiuser spaceport, and it’s pretty cool to see.”

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