Washington Washington. Just weeks after Boeing's troubled space capsule Starliner landed on Earth without astronauts and remained stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), the aerospace major has announced that the head of its space division will leave the company. Ted Colbert, president and CEO of Boeing's Defense, Space and Security unit, will step down immediately. The unit's chief operating officer Steve Parker will take over for Colbert until a new CEO is named.
“I want to share that Ted Colbert, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), will be leaving Boeing and I have asked Steve Parker to temporarily oversee BDS, effective immediately, until a later date when Ted's replacement is named,” Boeing President and CEO Kelly Ortberg said in a statement released Friday (Sept. 20).
“I want to thank Ted for his 15 years of service to The Boeing Company, supporting our customers, our people, and our communities. At this critical juncture, our priority is to restore our customers' trust and meet the high standards they expect of us to enable our critical missions around the world. By working together, we can improve our performance and ensure we meet our commitments,” the statement said.
Boeing's Starliner, which carried NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to the ISS in June, was supposed to bring them back in eight days. But the space capsule leaked helium and ran into problems with its thrusters, extending the astronauts' stay by several months. Despite Boeing's efforts to fix the space capsule remotely, NASA ultimately decided not to risk the astronauts' lives by sending them back on the faulty space capsule.
Boeing, which once enjoyed a stellar reputation and was the gold standard in aircraft manufacturing, has been affected since the Starliner failure. The company was already receiving major criticism for the problems with its 737 aircraft, several of which crashed and killed hundreds of people. Boeing is now being blamed for the situation that happened with NASA astronauts, who are apparently stranded in space and will return only next year, when SpaceX is ready to fly its own space capsule to bring the astronauts back.
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