Elon Musk Wants to Help With Boeing's Space Efforts
This company is struggling to get its rocket off the ground, something Musk knows a lot about.
Elon Musk last month said that Tesla, his EV company, "aspires to be as helpful as possible to other car companies." This brief statement came amid partnerships with competing car companies to use Tesla's EV charging network.
He also said at the time that Tesla would be "happy to license Autopilot/FSD or other Tesla technology." The world's richest man kept that helpful theme going Wednesday in one of his other sectors -- space -- through one of his other companies -- SpaceX.
DON'T MISS: SpaceX Has Some Wild Predictions for the Rest of 2023
Boeing (BA) - Get Free Report, a major name in the aerospace field, has been working hard to launch its Starliner rocket for years now. Despite plans to launch in July, the tentative date was scrubbed in June when Boeing said it had identified two major issues with the craft.
One involved problems with the lines that connect the capsule to its parachutes, while the other involved the discovery of apparently flammable tape that had been used inside the craft.
Boeing has been reporting ever-increasing losses on the Starliner project since NASA awarded the company a $5 billion contract to develop it in 2014. The company said Wednesday that it lost a further $257 million on the program during the second quarter of the year, bringing its total losses on the program to around $1.5 billion, according to CNBC.
Musk -- who heads his own space exploration company, SpaceX, offered his services in seeing Boeing's Starliner to, well, the stars.
More Elon Musk:
"SpaceX provided its knowledge of crewed parachute systems to Boeing and we are happy to be helpful in any other ways," Musk said. "Designing parachutes for orbital, crewed spacecraft is much harder than it may seem. Was a major challenge for SpaceX."
SpaceX, meanwhile, is set to complete all six of its contracted NASA flights before Boeing can get off the ground.
Though NASA, Boeing and Airborne, Boeing's parachute supplier, have been hard at work addressing the issues to ensure the craft is safe, the launch, according to Ars Technica, probably won't take place until 2024.
Sign up for Real Money Pro to learn the ins and outs of the trading floor from Doug Kass’s Daily Diary.
Source: TheStreet
