Limping Back.

This article reports that after enduring the longest suspension ever for a defense contractor, Boeing Co.'s launch back into the U.S. Air Force rocket business was hardly the glowing event some officials had expected. The resignation of Harry C. Stonecipher, the former Boeing executive who was pulled out of retirement in 2003 to wrangle ethics problems at the company, was announced late on March 7, 2005 after the markets had closed. Stonecipher took the helm following Phil Condit's departure in the wake of the Air Force-Boeing tanker procurement scandal. Air Force Secretary Peter Teets lifted what was to be a three-month suspension of Boeing's rocket sectors 20 months after imposing it in 2003. More than 25,000 pp. of proprietary data on Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Atlas V launch vehicle were found to be in Boeing's possession during a sensitive, multibillion-dollar competition in the late 1990s that has shaped the government launch manifest for years to come.