The $1.5bn spacecraft that could make or break Boeing after string of safety failures
NO one wants to be on a plane that has its door blown off at 16,000 feet.
Nor does an astronaut want to hear a weird buzzing sound coming from a rocket’s oxygen valve just before take-off.
That’s what happened yesterday when the launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was aborted after safety checks found malfunctions with the rocket.
The big problem for the aircraft maker is that it is responsible for both these issues in a matter of months.
Its reputation as one of the world’s biggest manufacturers now rests on whether it can safely get the manned rocket into orbit on Friday.
Failure to launch the Starliner would be a symbolic make-or-break moment for the US giant of the skies.
Boeing has already been engulfed in chaos since the start of the year after a door peg was torn off mid-flight on one of its new 737 planes.
Not long after taking off from Portland, Oregon, the force from the gaping hole in the aircraft twisted metal seats and sucked a T-shirt off a teenager’s back.
Weeks after that horror show, several US airlines found loose bolts on Boeing’s planes, deeming them unfit for flight.
Adding to the problems, two company whistleblowers who raised concerns about defects on 737 planes are now dead.
John Barnett, 62, was found with a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound in March, while Joshua Dean, 45, died last week after pneumonia.
Mr Barnett had claimed to have found 300 defects and “issues being ignored”.
Boeing admitted yesterday that employees had faked safety inspection records on some other 737 Max planes.
This was the same model involved in fatal crashes in Ethiopia in 2019 and Indonesia in 2018.
More questions
The former tragedy, which killed 157 people, came five months after the same model crashed in Indonesia, where 189 people died, and later resulted in the fleet being grounded for three years.
A few weeks ago, Nasa dismissed Boeing’s aircraft woes and declared the Starliner “ready to launch”.
But during the early hours of yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the flight was postponed after a buzzing was detected in the rocket. The scrubbed mission was another reputational blow.
Boeing has already been beaten by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch a passenger spaceship into orbit.
Musk has relished this latest blooper, posting on X: “Although Boeing got $4.2billion to develop an astronaut capsule and SpaceX only got $2.6billion, SpaceX finished four years sooner.”
Boeing has suffered $1.4billion in charges against the $4.2billion it got from NASA.
If it fails to launch on Friday it may face more questions over why it is spending so much on its space ambitions when passengers are more worried about bits of aircraft falling off.
