From today’s Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-01-30-Issue-49/):

The Best Way to Make a Profit as an Aerospace Company is to Fail (https://qz.com/1784335/the-space-military-industrial-complex...), a compelling piece about how massive corporations like Northrop Grumman have little incentive to hit their contract budgets and are arguably incentivized not to. “Northrop Grumman […] won the James Webb Space Telescope contract in 1996 with a promise that the project would cost $500 million and be flight-ready in 2007. The telescope is now likely to launch in 2021 and is expected to cost nearly $10 billion. [...] [W]ith every delay and snafu, Northrop Grumman rakes in more money as missed deadlines extend the timeline and require more funding from the government. One delay in 2018 brought Northrop Grumman close to a billion dollars alone—twice the price the firm originally quoted to the government for the entire project.” According to this document (pdf) released on Jan. 28 by the Government Accountability Office, the JWST has only a 12% chance of launching in March 2021. The massive overruns by Boeing on SLS are a similar example.

'Charge' here is a confusing term. The way I take it they have set aside this money in case they need to do another test. The title makes it seem as if they have charged (or are preparing to charge) Nasa for this amount. That wouldn't be too surprising given Boeing's history, but does not appear to be the case here (yet).

Directly from the financial report from Boeing:

> Fourth-quarter operating margin decreased to 0.5 percent due to a $410 million pre-tax Commercial Crew charge primarily to provision for an additional uncrewed mission for the Commercial Crew program, performance and mix. NASA is evaluating the data received during the December 2019 mission to determine if another uncrewed mission is required.

https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2020-01-29-Boeing-Reports-Fourt...

Boeing just posted it's first full-year loss since 1997. If you have to tell your investors bad-news, better to throw in all of the potential bad news that you were on the fence about than to have to make follow-up announcements. (Honey I totaled the car, and the other car may be out of gas, and all our toilets might be backed up.) https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/boeing-posts-annua...

Why do we even have this program?

When I heard about the software issues that doomed the 737 MAX, especially the cheapskate decision to only read ONE of the two angle-of-attack indicators, I instantly knew it was the offshoring to India. Cheap and lazy.