Elon Musk Offers Helping Hand As Boeing Starliner's Woes Continue

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday extended support to struggling aerospace giant Boeing Co BA.

What Happened: “SpaceX provided its knowledge of crewed parachute systems to Boeing and we are happy to be helpful in any other ways,” the CEO wrote in response to space journalist Eric Berger who noted further bad news for Boeing.

On Wednesday, Boeing noted that NASA’s commercial crew program had recorded a loss of $257 million due to the delay in Starliner’s launch, which will be paid by Boeing. This brings the total overrun costs on Starliner to about $1.5 billion.

The Starliner was aiming to launch in late July with two astronauts onboard to the International Space Station but was delayed indefinitely after a supplier flagged an issue with the parachute. The company needs time to conduct additional testing on its parachutes to enable a safe flight for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, Boeing said in a statement.

“Designing parachutes for orbital, crewed spacecraft is much harder than it may seem. Was a major challenge for SpaceX,” Musk noted in his post.

Why It Matters: NASA awarded Boeing with a $4.2 billion fixed-price contract to develop the Starliner in 2014 as part of its commercial crew program. A similar contract was also awarded to Musk’s SpaceX for about $2.6 billion.

SpaceX, in the meantime, is about to complete all its originally contracted missions and has even been awarded additional flights by NASA. The rocket manufacturer commemorated the third anniversary of its first crewed spaceflight known as the SpaceX Demo-2 mission conducted under NASA’s program earlier this year in May.

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