Well, if you were looking to see the Boeing Starliner soaring off of a launchpad, astronauts in tow, before 2025 is out, NASA officials are advising you to adjust your expectations.
That’s right, as SpaceX prepares to send the Dragon up to the International Space Station to conduct its 19th crewed launch at the end of the month, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program director, has said that the tentative plan, as of now, is to send Starliner into orbit for another test flight no earlier than 2026. And that flight may not even be carrying any crew.
“We really are working toward a flight as soon as early next year for Starliner,” Stich said in a press conference held for Crew 11, who are slated to be aboard SpaceX’s Dragon when the launch window opens on July 31. “And then ultimately, our goal is to get into crew rotation flights with Starliner, and those would start no earlier than the second rotation slot at the end of next year.”
It’s another ignominious look for Starliner, the spacecraft that was responsible for months of embarrassing headlines last year when, after finally launching in June, it sprang numerous helium leaks and had thruster failures before its two-person crew had even docked at the International Space Station.
Ultimately, NASA officials opted to fly the spacecraft home, sans crew, and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams ended up stranded aboard the ISS until they could hitch a ride on a SpaceX Dragon.
For a while, it was looking like the episode might have spelled out Starliner’s demise.
Boeing was supposed to have Starliner through its crewed flight test by 2017, but the project has been running years behind schedule and more than $2 billion over the budget laid out in NASA’s $4.2 billion fixed price contract agreement. Shortly after last year’s messy, half-completed crewed test flight, Boeing ended up writing off another $125 million in unexpected costs for the program.
So why haven’t they scrapped the whole thing?
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, most likely.
Once upon a time, way back in 2014, NASA officials decided to turn over getting astronauts into space from American soil to the industry, awarding a contract to Boeing, the aeronautical juggernaut, to have a spacecraft built and ready for its crewed test flight by 2017.
But officials realized that it might be dangerous to have the federal space agency completely reliant on one company to get its people into orbit, so they awarded another, similar but smaller contract to SpaceX.
But while both companies missed the original test flight dates, the SpaceX Dragon’s crewed test flight went off without a hitch in May of 2020.
When Starliner’s 2024 crewed test flight went south, it became clear that SpaceX was the only way NASA would be able to bring the Starliner crew home, a reality Musk, who had become a fan and one of the Trump campaign’s largest donors, highlighted in various social media posts criticizing the Biden administration.
In the aftermath of the disastrous test flight, there were numerous reports that Boeing was considering scrapping Starliner altogether, but in March NASA pointedly announced that the federal space agency and Boeing were in fact still working on correcting the spacecraft’s issues.
Last month, in the midst of a very public breakup with President Donald Trump, Musk threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon altogether, leaving the nation with no way to get its astronauts home on its power.
He also, in one post, made it crystal clear why Starliner hasn’t been scrapped.
Thus, Crew 11 will soon be borne aloft in another SpaceX Dragon, but NASA folks have every reason to try to make Boeing Starliner work. And sometime next year, we’ll see if they manage to make that happen.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
