Boeing says it plans to move its corporate headquarters from Chicago to the Washington, D.C., area.

The company made it official on Thursday.

Boeing is a major defense contractor, so the move would put its executives in Arlington, Virginia, close to customers in the Pentagon.

It would also put them near the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates Boeing's business of building passenger airplanes.

The relocation will also put the company close to its rivals, including Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which already in the D.C. area.

Boeing’s roots are in the Seattle area, and it has assembly plants in Washington state and South Carolina.

The company moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 after an unusually public search that also considered Dallas and Denver.

Boeing isn’t the only company to recently decide to pack its bags for the D.C. area.

In April, local officials approved Amazon’s plan to build a 350-foot-tall building in Arlington.

The building will serve as Amazon’s second headquarters.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —

Boeing's astronaut capsule faces more launch delays after the discovery of problems that should have been caught earlier, officials said.

Boeing and NASA announced the latest setback Thursday.

Until recently, the Starliner capsule was on track for a July test flight with two astronauts to the International Space Station, a planned trip that was already well behind schedule.

But final reviews uncovered issues with the parachute lines and other problems that were present on last year's test flight with no one on board and, officials said, should have been caught years ago.

As for whether Starliner might fly by year's end, Boeing program manager Mark Nappi said, "I think it's feasible, but I certainly don't want to commit to any dates or time frames" until the problems are fixed.

The capsule is full of wire harnesses wrapped in white tape that's flammable, according to Nappi. Rather than trying to remove the hundreds of feet of tape, which was supposed to protect against scuffing, the company may cover it with a safer material.

The parachute lines also were not designed to be strong enough to meet safety standards.

"These tests were run many years ago. We reviewed those results. We missed those results, and this could have been caught sooner," Nappi said.

Following the retirement of the space shuttles more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to and from the space station. SpaceX has now completed 10 crew flights, three of them private. Boeing had to repeat its 2019 test flight without a crew because of software and other issues.

"NASA desperately needs a second provider for crew transportation," said Steve Stich, the space agency's commercial crew program manager.

The goal is to have one SpaceX and one Boeing taxi flight to the station each year.

CINCINNATI — Prosecutors tied accused Chinese spymaster Yanjun Xu to other espionage cases on Tuesday, trying to persuade a jury that he was part of a wide-reaching conspiracy to attack aviation companies worldwide and steal their trade secrets.

Frederic Hascoet, a project manager with French aviation company Safran, testified that his laptop computer was infected with malware during a visit to China in January 2014. He had traveled there to oversee a joint venture between Safran and a Chinese company to assemble jet engine parts.

“The IT department said I had a virus and they took my laptop. They had to replace the hard drive,” Hascoet said, using a French interpreter.

A federal grand jury in Cincinnati indicted Xu in 2018 on charges of conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and theft of trade secrets from Evendale-based GE Aviation. Prosecutors say China desperately wants to duplicate GE’s highly successful gas turbine engine.

But prosecutors say Xu is part of an extensive conspiracy that dates back to at least 2013 and involves Safran and several other aviation companies.

Xu is not specifically named in or charged by a Southern District of California grand jury in the malware attack on Safran. But prosecutors say in a recent court filing that Xu was still part of that conspiracy.

“The superseding indictment references some of Xu’s actions to obtain technical, aviation information from Safran, including that he directed a Safran employee to plant malware into the company network … Xu’s conduct related to the Safran hacking—some of which is reflected in the Southern District of California indictment—is relevant here,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Mangan wrote in a recent motion.

This is the first of several acts of alleged espionage that prosecutors are expected to show the jury over the coming weeks, to establish Xu as a spymaster who tried to recruit employees of aviation companies to share information.

Whether these actions constitute the legitimate sharing of knowledge and expertise, or the illegal theft of trade secrets, will be up to the jury to decide.

Xu is the first Chinese intelligence agent ever to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial. His trial began before U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black on Oct. 18 and is expected to last for one month.

Xu, who is also known as Qu Hui and Zhang Hui, is a deputy division director at the Chinese Ministry of State Security, which is the Chinese intelligence agency.

Agents arrested Xu in Belgium in April 2018 and extradited him to the U.S., where a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.

“In an aircraft, weight is king … you have to have the lightest aircraft possible,” testified Rizwan Ramakdawala, Manned Aircraft Division Chief at the U.S. Defense Technology Security Administration.

No one else in the world, except for GE, can manufacture jet engine fan blades made from a light, durable composite material, making the technology highly sought-after. China has been trying to duplicate this technology since at least 2015, Ramakdawala testified.

Prosecutors called a former Boeing IT employee as their last witness on Tuesday, asking him to describe the emails he received from Xu requesting that he share information during trips to China.

“We think your information is compatible with the need of Chinese technology … we would like to invite you for an exchange the next time you return to China,” according to an email that Xu sent to former Boeing employee Sun Li in 2016.

Li, who lives in Washington, testified that he visited his father in China once a year. Xu offered to pay for his travel expenses, if he shared information about Boeing with him, but Li said he refused the offer.

“Boeing being an international defense enterprise, it must have sufficient experience for us to reference. I think there is a lot of room for an exchange even in your field of expertise,” Xu wrote in a 2015 email to Li.