Boeing announced it would lay off 141 employees at several Florida locations beginning in January including several at facilities at Kennedy Space Center where the beleaguered Starliner spacecraft is manufactured.
The workforce reduction statement said the permanent layoffs will begin Jan. 17 at 18 offices in the state.
Those include 26 at offices at KSC and another 20 in Titusville. An Orlando site will lose four jobs while other losses across the state will be in Miami, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville and Fort Walton Beach.
Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg said during the last quarterly earnings call in October that the company needed to focus on its core businesses of commercial aircraft and defense.
Where that leaves its space efforts remains a question mark.
Boeing’s hand in space includes the CST-100 Starliner, constructing core stages for NASA’s Space Launch System and supporting the International Space Station. It also has a 50% stake in United Launch Alliance with Lockheed Martin.
The layoffs at KSC could affect progress on Starliner, which flew its first crewed mission to the ISS this year, but it did not end how the company had hoped.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched in Starliner on the Crew Flight Test from Cape Canaveral atop a ULA Atlas V rocket and managed to dock at the ISS, but the propulsion module for Starliner suffered helium leaks and some failed thrusters that ultimately led to NASA choosing to send it home without astronauts.
That decision has put the certification of Starliner up in the air with a potential first regular mission to the ISS pushed to no earlier than the end of 2025.
Speculation has been Boeing would shut the Starliner program down instead of fulfilling its contract to NASA.
“I think that that we’re better off being doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” Ortberg said in October. “So we’re in the process of taking an evaluation of the portfolio.”
The company has been amid years of continued losses while having major reputation issues. The company had already announced layoffs nationwide as it tried to raise cash and avoid bankruptcy, and dealt with a long strike among machinists that halted its aircraft operations.
The company has not seen a profitable quarter since 2018.
Starliner has been a thorn in Boeing’s financial side in the years since it was awarded in 2016 alongside SpaceX the NASA contract to provide commercial ferry service to the ISS.
Although the NASA contract is worth $4.6 billion to provide six operational missions to the ISS, Boeing has reported more than $1.8 billion in losses while only getting a portion of that contract for development of the spacecraft.
The last three months added another $250 million in loss “primarily to reflect schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs,” according to the quarterly report. That’s on top of the $125 million announced in the second quarter.
Overall, it’s among nearly $2.4 billion of operational losses in the third quarter as part of its overall Defense, Space & Security segment.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had spoken with Ortberg after Starliner made its crewless landing in September, and that Ortberg indicated the company had every intention of following through on the contract.
Not calling out its space efforts specifically, but not discounting them among non-core business, Ortberg said, “Do these things add value to the company or distract us? So I’m in the process of going through that.”
He reiterated that the company’s core is commercial airplanes and defense systems, and that those would remain its long-run focus.
“But there’s probably some things on the fringe there that we can be more efficient with, or that just distract us from our main goal here,” he said.
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