In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing may shed its space business to focus on commercial aircraft and defense systems. This could be due in part to this summer’s test flight of its Starliner crew transport to the International Space Station (ISS), which adversely reshaped public opinion of the beleaguered aerospace titan.
But despite some of its bad publicity, Boeing’s six decades in space have helped to facilitate a permanent off-planet U.S. presence and enabled our first footsteps on the Moon.
Facing challenges
Even before Starliner’s test flight brought Boeing poor press this year, the capsule’s evolution proved troubled. In 2014, the company won a $4.2 billion NASA contract to build the ISS crew capsule. A botched test flight, sans crew, in 2019 failed to reach the space station and despite success in 2022, problems continued to mount. This included propulsion system faults, flammability issues with adhesive tape, and worries about parachute safety.
It piled unwanted pressure on Boeing, which was already weathering negative publicity after fatal crashes of its 737 Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019. A door-plug blowout on another Max in 2024 forced an emergency landing. And a seven-week machinists’ strike ended this month after grinding Boeing’s 737, 777, and 767 jet production to a standstill.
Against this gloomy backdrop, Starliner launched its first astronauts — NASA’s Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Suni Williams — in June for a planned eight-day ISS stay. But helium leaks and reaction control system failures repeatedly lengthened their mission. Days turned to weeks, and weeks became months. NASA opted to return Starliner to Earth empty in September and keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until February.
Boeing is tasked to fly six more Starliner crew-rotation flights before the ISS retires and is deorbited after 2030. But as engineers dig into what went wrong and delays continue to mount, the program’s future is left hanging precariously in the balance.
It is a huge blow to a company whose name is synonymous with aviation and whose machines for decades have plied the world’s skies and other skies beyond.
Historic aviation
In 1961, NASA picked Boeing to build the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V. This behemoth was until 2022 the biggest and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status. Flown 13 times between 1967 and 1973, it sent 24 men to the Moon and put the largest single object into Earth orbit: America’s first space station, Skylab.
Standing 138 feet (42 meters) tall, the S-IC held 193,000 gallons (731,000 liters) of kerosene and 265,000 gallons (100,000 liters) of liquid oxygen. Its five F-1 engines produced 7.7 million pounds (3.5 million kilograms) of thrust. The S-IC burned for the first 168 seconds of each launch, lifting the behemoth to an altitude of 45 miles (72 kilometers) and a velocity of 5,100 mph (8,200 kilometers per hour) before the Saturn V’s upper stages took over.
For the astronauts, riding the S-IC was an unearthly experience: “Like distant thunder of a storm far over the horizon,” wrote Apollo 8’s Frank Borman. “A guttural roar you felt, rather than heard,” said Apollo 10’s Tom Stafford, while Fred Haise of Apollo 13 recalled the “pronounced herky-jerky, left-to-right motion” induced by the F-1 engines.
But Boeing’s involvement with Apollo ran deeper. It built five unmanned Lunar Orbiters, which from 1966 to 1968 mapped 99 percent of the Moon at resolutions finer than 200 feet (60 meters) — critically aiding NASA’s selection of Apollo landing sites.
The company also built the four-wheeled lunar rover, called the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), which was used during the last three Apollo missions between 1971 and 1972. Described by Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott as “a brilliant piece of engineering,” the battery-powered rover achieved a top speed of 10 mph (16 km/h) on the hummocky lunar surface, covering a maximum distance of 22 miles (35 km) and reaching almost 5 miles (8 km) from the lunar module.
Into the solar system
Three decades later, as NASA again zeroed- in on the Moon, Boeing was tapped to make the second stage of the Ares I crew launch vehicle — a rocket later canceled in 2010. But in 2011, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was born, with Boeing chosen to build its 212-foot-tall (65 m) core stage. Fed by four shuttle-heritage RS-25 engines, it generated almost a quarter of the 8.8 million pounds (4 million kg) of thrust needed to lift the SLS off the ground, the rest coming from two solid-fueled boosters.
Related: By the numbers: The Space Launch System, NASA’s next Moon rocket
After a problem-plagued evolution, the SLS first flew to great fanfare in 2022, lofting an uncrewed Orion capsule on the Artemis I mission to the Moon. It will next fly NASA astronauts around the Moon on Artemis II in 2025, before powering the first crewed lunar landing mission in over a half-century on Artemis III in 2026.
Related: By the numbers: The Space Launch System, NASA’s next Moon rocket
Boeing is also building the upper stages the SLS needs to carry astronauts beyond Earth’s orbit. Its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) performed flawlessly on Artemis I, with additional usage planned on Artemis II and III. And the in-development Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) will support crewed missions from Artemis IV after 2028.
The EUS, which completed its critical design review in 2020, enables the SLS to lift not only crew-carrying Orion ships but also large hardware components to build the Gateway space station in lunar orbit.
Nearer to home, Boeing’s solid-fueled Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) flew 24 times on shuttles and Titan IV rockets from 1982 to 2004. Despite its failure to deliver NASA’s first tracking and data-relay satellite into orbit, the IUS later sent the Magellan probe to Venus, Galileo to Jupiter, Ulysses to the poles of the Sun, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory on its 25-year mission to survey the X-ray universe.
Since 2006, Boeing has also enjoyed a 50-50 partnership with Lockheed Martin in United Launch Alliance (ULA), whose Delta II, Atlas V, Delta IV, and Vulcan rockets have logged 170 missions.
Notably, Boeing’s Delta IV flew 45 times from 2002 to 2024, mainly for national security missions but also for NASA’s first Orion test flight in 2014 and to launch the Parker Solar Probe in 2018. Its Delta IV Heavy configuration, with three common booster cores, was the most powerful rocket in the world from 2004 to 2018.
Planetary exploration has also fallen within Boeing’s remit. It built Mariner 10, which in 1974 and 1975 was the first probe to use the gravity of one world (Venus) to reach another (Mercury). The probe completed three flybys of Mercury, unveiling the mysterious face of the Sun’s innermost planet for the first time.
Boeing also designed Dyna-Soar, a Cold War-era program to build a hypersonic research vehicle and military glider for reconnaissance and electronic surveillance of Soviet Russia. Capable of suborbital and orbital missions, this single-seat spaceplane was canceled in 1963, but its legacy remained visible in the later design of the space shuttle.
More recently, Boeing developed prototypes for the X-38 mini-shuttle to return astronauts from the ISS in emergencies. That program was canceled in 2002 due to budget cuts.
And since 2010, the Boeing-built X-37B uncrewed mini-shuttle flew six times for military and technology research in Earth orbit, with mission durations gradually stretched from 224 days to 908 days. The X-37B can modify its orbital altitude and inclination, and it became the first U.S. autonomous orbital vehicle to return to a runway landing. A seventh X-37B mission is currently underway, having launched last December.
But those impressive flight times pale in comparison with what arguably is Boeing’s crowning glory, a spaceship that has been in orbit for over 25 years: the ISS itself. Selected as the space station’s prime contractor in 1995, Boeing built its Unity node, Destiny lab, Quest airlock, truss structure, and solar arrays. To date, the ISS has facilitated more than 2,500 experiments by almost 300 men and women from 22 nations.
Final frontier
With such an impressive and long-lasting portfolio — from spaceplanes to space stations and rockets to satellites — it remains to be seen what Boeing’s next steps might be. But if the corporation does dispense partly or fully with its space business, it will draw down a curtain on more than six decades of contributions to U.S. exploration beyond Earth.