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Raised eyebrows as Boeing reportedly mulls sale of stellar space enterprise | Space

Company that helped build Nasa’s Saturn V rockets said to be keen to focus on fixing problems in core aircraft business

Boeing announced last month its quarterly losses rose to almost $6bn amid a workers’ strike, and its new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, suggested his priority would be fixing problems and mending bridges in the company’s core business of manufacturing aircraft. Swope said some of Boeing’s troubles in its space division could be attributable to how the new business of commercial spaceflight is conducted: Nasa pays operators fixed price and term contracts instead of the mostly open-ended and more fluid partnerships of the Apollo era and beyond. “Where Nasa is paying for transportation services to the moon, to the space station, for astronauts, for cargo, it’s a fixed price arrangement and not a typical one that Boeing or another big government contractor would be comfortable with.

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