Boeing's ongoing difficulties in launching astronauts on Starliner after a decade.

NASA's Starliner is a human-grade spacecraft intended for transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Boeing started developing the spacecraft in 2014 after signing a $4.2 billion contract with NASA under the Commercial Crew Program.

NASA chose SpaceX for the task and awarded Elon Musk's company $2.6 billion to create the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

"According to Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, the Commercial Crew Program represented a new venture for NASA, as they had previously relied on their own engineering talent to send humans to the space station."

NASA was able to delegate "some of those responsibilities" to the private sector, as stated by Henry.

"Congress was hesitant to support this approach, but only because Boeing backed it, which gave NASA the confidence to proceed with the program."

Since the past ten years, Boeing has faced challenges in fulfilling the six missions it has been assigned to carry out with NASA.

Boeing has spent $1.5 billion of the $5 billion it received to develop Starliner on delay overruns. The company recently completed a milestone crewed mission, which it must finish before NASA can certify Starliner for operational missions.

Since 2020, SpaceX has completed more than a dozen crewed missions to space, both launching NASA astronauts and private citizens.

The Starliner project of Boeing has faced numerous obstacles, and the future of its long-awaited capsule remains uncertain.