CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Virgin Galactic has filed a countersuit against Boeing over a project to develop a new mothership aircraft, stating that Boeing did not do well in the project.
The lawsuit was filed on April 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, coming two weeks after Boeing filed suit against Virgin Galactic in Virginia, claiming that Virgin did not pay over $25 million in project invoices and took trade secrets.
The disagreement is about a project announced in 2022 to create a new aircraft to replace Virgin’s current VMS Eve as a platform for its suborbital spaceplanes. Boeing said that work on the project ended in 2023 after preliminary design work showed that the aircraft could not be built as desired by Virgin Galactic.
Virgin claims that Boeing did poor and incomplete work on the initial phases of the project, including an integrated baseline review (IBR) and preliminary design review (PDR). Virgin stated that neither review was acceptable.
“The quality of the IBR Boeing conducted was so poor that Virgin Galactic and Boeing agreed that Boeing was required to redo the review,” the complaint states. The second IBR was even worse, Virgin said, providing less than half of the required deliverables, and failed to include items such as organization charts, a program execution plan and risk management process.
Virgin’s complaint states that in the subsequent PDR, Boeing provided only 348 of the required 580 “artifacts,” or items of intellectual property and supporting analyses required. “These 348 artifacts were of such poor quality that only sixty percent (60%) of them had any value,” Virgin stated. “These missing artifacts related to critical aspects of the Mothership program, including avionics, design, flight physics, propulsion, stress engineering, vehicle sub-systems, and material and process.”
“Boeing’s failures with respect to its agreement with Virgin Galactic are consistent with Boeing’s record of poor quality control and mismanagement,” the complaint concluded.
The lawsuit also addresses allegations by Boeing that Virgin Galactic misappropriated its trade secrets in the form of two “math models” of the mothership design that Boeing says it inadvertently provided to Virgin along with test data about a composite material. Virgin says the documents are either intellectual property that belongs to Virgin Galactic or which it has a license to use under the master agreement between Boeing and Virgin.
Virgin, in the lawsuit, seeks declaratory judgement that it did not misappropriate trade secrets as well as damages that, at a minimum, represent the difference between the $45.6 million Virgin paid Boeing under the contract and the “substantially lower actual value” of the work performed. The complaint does not provide the company’s estimate for that actual value.
