NASA plans to retire the International Space Station around 2030, so the opportunities are dwindling for NASA to use Starliner for all six of the crew ferry flights on contract. In November, Musk posted on X: “There is no logical purpose to Starliner, given that NASA plans to deorbit Space Station in ~5 years.”
Not so new management
It will fall to a new Boeing manager to oversee whatever becomes of Starliner.
Last week, Boeing confirmed John Mulholland is taking over as Starliner program manager. He replaces Mark Nappi, who held the top job on the Starliner program since 2022 and is retiring from Boeing later this month.
Mulholland led the Starliner program from 2011 until 2020, when Boeing reassigned him to manage the company’s engineering sustainment contract for the International Space Station. This followed Starliner’s first orbital test flight, without people aboard, which ended prematurely due to software issues.
Although Mulholland was not in charge during Starliner’s most recent setbacks, it was under his leadership that engineers made the design decisions that led to many of Starliner’s problems. These include the software woes that kept the spacecraft from reaching the space station on the 2019 test flight and the use of valves in the ship’s service module that were susceptible to corrosion. In 2023, just a couple of months before Starliner was supposed to launch on the crew test flight, officials discovered a design problem with Starliner’s parachutes and found that Boeing installed flammable tape inside the capsule’s cockpit.
And the problem that caused Starliner’s thrusters to overheat in space last year can be traced to the design of the spacecraft’s four propulsion pods, or doghouses, that retain heat like a thermos during successive thruster firings. Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, Starliner’s propulsion supplier, approved the doghouse early in the program, years before Starliner ever flew in space.
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