Boeing names Space Station exec as new head of Starliner program

By Joey Roulette

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) -The vice president leading Boeing's Starliner spacecraft unit, Mark Nappi, has left his role in the program and been replaced by the company's International Space Station program manager, John Mulholland, a Boeing spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday.

Nappi, who led Boeing's Starliner program from 2022 through major engineering issues and testing mishaps, is currently in a new role "focused on identifying opportunities for streamlining improvement across the division's space programs until he retires next month," the company said.

Mulholland previously led Boeing's Starliner program from 2011 before switching in 2020 to the company's International Space Station program, which works closely with NASA under a multibillion-dollar station operations contract.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, in development under a $4.5 billion NASA contract to ferry astronauts to the ISS, has faced an array of engineering challenges since 2019.

In its first test mission last summer flying astronauts, Starliner was forced by NASA to leave its crew aboard the ISS and return empty in September over problems with its propulsion system. 

A panel of senior NASA officials in August had voted to have a Crew Dragon capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX bring them back instead, deeming Starliner too risky for the astronauts.

Paul Hill, a veteran NASA flight director and member of the agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during a quarterly panel meeting on Thursday that NASA and Boeing continue to investigate Starliner's propulsion system.

A Boeing spokesperson said on Thursday that the company and NASA have not yet determined what Starliner's next mission will look like, such as whether it will need to repeat its crewed flight test before receiving NASA certification for routine flights.

NASA's decision in August to have Starliner come back empty and leave its astronauts on the ISS for months longer than planned was a bruising moment for Boeing's space unit, as SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule dominates the private spaceflight business.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Orlando, Florida; Editing by Leslie Adler and Matthew Lewis)