Nine months. That is how long Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams sat on the International Space Station in 2024 waiting for a Boeing capsule that could not safely bring them home. SpaceX eventually did it. NASA's February 2026 investigation into how that happened runs 311 pages, and the short version is: both Boeing's Defense, Space and Security division and NASA's own oversight culture failed, repeatedly, in ways that were visible before anyone launched.
The question now is whether NASA should keep funding Starliner or cut the contract. My answer is cut it, and the math is not close.
What $4.6 Billion Bought
Boeing won its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract in 2014. The original fixed-price deal was structured to protect taxpayers from cost overruns, but Boeing has absorbed over $1.5 billion in losses on the program while NASA has paid out more than $4.6 billion total. The capsule has completed one crewed docking. That docking ended with the crew coming home on a competitor's vehicle.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon, by contrast, has completed multiple crewed missions without a nine-month unplanned extension. Capacity factor matters in energy; it matters in spacecraft too. A vehicle that cannot reliably return its crew is not a redundant option. It is a liability dressed up as one.
The fairest argument for continuing Starliner is the monopoly problem. If NASA cancels the contract, SpaceX becomes the only U.S. provider of crewed orbital transport. That concentration of single-vendor risk is real, and I take it seriously. But redundancy only has value if the backup system is actually reliable. A second provider that strands astronauts does not reduce risk; it adds a new category of it.
The Culture Problem Does Not Stay in One Division
The February report did not describe a one-time engineering failure. It described cultural failures at Boeing BDS that mirror what investigators found in Boeing's Commercial Airplanes division after the 737 MAX crashes. Leeham News reported in April 2026 that those same patterns persist. Last week, Boeing confirmed 25 aircraft on the 737 line required rework after a miscalibrated machine scratched wiring. Boeing executive Jay Malave called it "not a significant amount" of rework. Three days per plane across 25 planes is 75 days of lost production, and the framing of that as minor is precisely the cultural tell the 311-page report is warning about.
CEO Kelly Ortberg has promised reform. Those promises deserve a fair hearing in commercial aviation, where Boeing has no alternative but to fix itself. In crewed spaceflight, NASA has an alternative. It is already flying.
The counterargument that Boeing's reforms under Ortberg could eventually extend to BDS is plausible in theory. But "eventually" is not a timeline, and NASA's job is not to fund Boeing's organizational therapy. The agency has a mission: get crew to and from the ISS safely and reliably. One provider is already doing that.
What NASA should do is specific: terminate the Starliner contract, negotiate a structured wind-down that recovers whatever intellectual property has value, and use the remaining budget to fund a second competitive procurement. Sierra Space's Dream Chaser has a cargo contract and is still in development. Blue Origin's New Shepard is orbital-adjacent. The market for a second crewed provider exists; it just should not be Boeing Starliner in its current form.
Announced capacity does not get crew home. Installed, proven, flying capacity does. Starliner has demonstrated which category it occupies.
