After months of uncertainty, NASA has announced that the federal space agency is giving Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft another chance. That’s right, NASA officials have announced that Starliner, the ship whose malfunctions left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded aboard the International Space Station for months back in 2024, will get at least one more chance to take flight with a human crew and everything.
NASA dubbed the 2024 test flight debacle – one of a series of missteps and stumbles Starliner has seen over the course of more than a decade in development for a spacecraft that was originally supposed to be operational by 2017 — a “Type A mishap” in a scathing report issued in February. The report also issued 61 recommendations to fix the Boeing Starliner program before attempting to get it back off the ground again.
In the wake of that report, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has concluded that despite the Starliner project’s checkered past, Boeing is now moving in the right direction as he noted in announcing a new timeline for Starliner last week from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Mistakes and missteps in the business of sending astronauts to and from one of the most demanding and dangerous environments are always possibilities, despite how hard we work to minimize them,” Isaacman said. “Alongside our partners, we endeavor to engineer safe vehicles, test and qualify hardware, train our operators and astronauts, mitigate the risk to the greatest extent possible, and then fly.”
In keeping with this forgiving outlook, Isaacman announced that the new plan is for Boeing to launch another test flight as soon as December, albeit this time around the flight will be uncrewed. If all goes well, NASA is planning on putting astronauts back aboard the spacecraft for a crewed test flight by 2028.
However, Boeing has some work to do first. During the messy crewed flight in 2024, Starliner’s astronaut crew arrived at the International Space Station to find that their thrusters were malfunctioning when they attempted the docking portion of their mission, with multiple thrusters failing during the approach to the ISS.
Although the astronauts were ultimately able to dock with the ISS, the incident was enough to spook officials about bringing the two-person astronaut crew home in the ship. Their 10-day trip turned into a nine-month sojourn aboard the ISS before they came home aboard a SpaceX vehicle. Starliner returned home empty but otherwise without incident.
Since then, Boeing engineers have deduced that the thruster failure was due to corrosion, a problem that is now being addressed by a new method for flushing the hydrazine propellant out to prevent similar corrosion in the future.
The next crewed mission, whenever it actually takes place, will be captained by astronaut Woody Hoburg, who previously spent 186 days in space. Hoburg stated that he has “enormous confidence” in the new plans for Starliner. “We’re putting the program on a path to correct the key technical deficiencies and return to crewed flight as soon as we’re ready,” he said.
In addition to the fixes required to get Starliner in shape, Boeing will no longer be launching Starliner aboard the ULA Atlas V. Instead, the spacecraft is slated to go up atop the Vulcan. The only catch is that the Vulcan isn’t currently certified to carry people, a situation that will require Boeing and NASA to get the new rocket certified for use in human spaceflight. All told, the Starliner fixes and the rocket certification will cost NASA another $359 million, on top of the more than $5.1 billion NASA has paid Boeing so far and more than $2 billion in cost overruns that Boeing has footed the bill for itself.
But for NASA, getting Starliner up and running is still worth it. “But from the beginning,
commercial crew was built around competition, and NASA continues to see real value in having two crew transportation providers,” Isaacman said.
NASA is even going to put more money down to purchase additional flights from Boeing for Starliner whenever it is up and running, according to Isaacman. In other words, even though the current plan is to phase out the ISS by the 2030s, NASA is still intent on having at least two commercial carriers to tote astronauts to and from space, instead of relying solely on SpaceX, go figure
