All posts tagged: Boeings

NASA May Shrink Boeing’s Moon-Mission Role While Handing SpaceX Core Rocket Responsibilities

NASA May Shrink Boeing’s Moon-Mission Role While Handing SpaceX Core Rocket Responsibilities

Published by Jenni Sidey

President Donald Trump’s NASA chief could soon announce Boeing’s diminishing role in returning astronauts to the Moon, while leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company to do the heavy lifting. Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS), originally the rocket backbone of the Artemis mission, would no longer carry the Lockheed Martin-built Orion crew capsule to the Moon. Under the new plan, SpaceX’s Starship would take the lead. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman plans to meet with the companies working on the Artemis program next Tuesday, including Boeing, SpaceX, and Blue Origin, to discuss progress and current paths forward. Sources close to the program said any significant changes could face immediate Congressional scrutiny. “NASA is committed to using the SLS architecture through at least Artemis V, which is necessary to support both human landing system providers, and their associated acceleration plans to return American astronauts to the Moon,” Isaacman said in a statement. “We’re incredibly supportive of both our HLS providers and their plans to accelerate America’s path forward to the moon,” Isaacman added. SpaceX will ultimately …

Air Force None: Why Trump’s Big, Beautiful Boeings Can’t Fly Yet

Air Force None: Why Trump’s Big, Beautiful Boeings Can’t Fly Yet

Published by Sam Flores

Air Force One’s aborted flight to Davos last week was one more stage in a prolonged failure to modernize the large jets that serve American presidents. The current airplanes have been in use for 36 years and are increasingly hard to maintain. Their aging has accelerated as President Trump makes frequent weekend trips to Palm Beach. More crucially, the program to replace them has for a long time become ensnared in the downward spiral of Boeing. Nobody has been more aware of Boeing’s shortcomings than Trump. A month before he began his first term as president, in December 2016, he summoned Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, to Mar-a-Lago to be grilled on the costs of the Air Force One program, having threatened to cancel it in a tweet. After the meeting, Muilenburg praised Trump’s “business headset” and said he had agreed to cap the program’s costs at $4 billion. After another meeting with Trump in January 2017, Muilenburg said Boeing would “streamline the process” and achieve “substantial cost reduction.” Muilenburg’s objectives were never …