NASA to keep Starliner crew in space until 2025, with SpaceX handling return

NASA announced Saturday that it will use SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to bring home two astronauts stuck in space for months, because the agency does not have confidence in Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.

“It was just too much risk for the crew,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.

The highly anticipated decision, one of the most consequential by the space agency in years, is a devastating blow to Boeing, which had argued vehemently that Starliner was safe even though it suffered a series of thruster problems and helium leaks as it brought NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore to the International Space Station in early June.

The decision means that the autonomous Starliner spacecraft will return to Earth, likely in early September, without anyone on board and that Williams and Wilmore will have their stay on the space station, originally intended to last eight days, extended to about eight months – the next Dragon return flight is scheduled for February.

NASA leaders cast the decision as an agonizing one driven primarily by concerns for the safety of the astronauts. Not only are the astronauts’ lives at stake, but also the reputation of NASA, the world’s premier space agency, which has witnessed its share of tragedy.

“Space flight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing Saturday at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “And a test flight by nature is neither safe, nor routine. And so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety.”

NASA said its top leaders and engineers unanimously agreed with the decision, which was made with past spaceflight disasters in mind, particularly the fatal accidents of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, which caused the deaths of a combined 14 astronauts. Seven died on each spacecraft: Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986; Columbia came apart as it returned to Earth in 2003. Both disasters were caused by a culture that did not properly prioritize safety, subsequent investigations found.

For Boeing, the decision to use a rival’s spacecraft to bring back the Starliner crew is an embarrassment that adds to the company’s woes in recent years, including a midair blowout on a 737 Max plane earlier this year, and two fatal crashes, in 2018 and 2019, that killed a combined 346 people.

As the Starliner capsule approached the space station on June 6, five of the spacecraft’s 28 thrusters, used to orient the vehicle, suddenly stopped firing, forcing ground controllers to shut them down and attempt to reboot them. Four eventually came back online, and NASA and Boeing spent the following several weeks trying to figure out what went wrong. The spacecraft also suffered a series of small helium leaks in its propulsion system.

Boeing argued that its engineers understood the problems and said the company “remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft and its ability to return safely with crew.” NASA, however, could not get to a point where its engineers felt they fully understood the problems, even after running several ground tests, analyzing the data and even taking apart hardware on the ground.

Reviews of the data led to “a lot of tense conversations,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations. That will require some fence-mending between the two sides, Bowersox suggested.

“People have emotional investment in either option, and that gives you a healthy discourse,” he said. “But after that, you have to do some work to keep your team together, right? To keep your team restored and ready for the next issue. And I’ll acknowledge that we have some work to do there.”

Boeing said it would work with NASA to ensure the uncrewed Starliner comes back safely. “Boeing continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft,” the company said.

The choice to keep the crew on the space station until next year was made using information provided by Boeing, as well as the extensive testing NASA and Boeing did over the past several weeks, officials said. In the end, NASA was still concerned that Starliner would not be able to return Williams and Wilmore home safely.

Meanwhile, Wilmore and Williams will return with SpaceX, which has been flying crews to the space station for NASA since 2020. Instead of launching a full contingent of four astronauts, SpaceX will fly just two when it launches Dragon to the station in late September. That crew, which would then include Williams and Wilmore, would come home in February 2025. NASA has not said which two crew members would be bumped from the flight to make room for Williams and Wilmore.

SpaceX did not respond to a Washington Post request for comment. But the company “stands ready to support @NASA however we can,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell wrote on social media platform X, whose owner, billionaire Elon Musk, is the founder and CEO of SpaceX.

Starliner’s June test flight was the spacecraft’s first with humans on board. Nelson said that he was “100 percent” certain that Starliner would fly NASA astronauts again, though agency officials said they were not certain if they would require Boeing to fly another test flight before certifying the spacecraft for regular operational missions.

Even before the thruster problems, Starliner had several issues. On its first test flight in 2019, without any people on board, Starliner’s onboard computer system was 11 hours off and started executing commands for an entirely different part of the mission, which burned precious fuel. Programmers were able to send commands to the spacecraft, fixing the problem, but the spacecraft never docked with the station.

As a result, Boeing decided to fly another test flight, in 2022. Starliner also had some problems with its thrusters on that flight, but ultimately docked with the station and flew back to Earth successfully, paving the way for the crewed test flight with Williams and Wilmore.

Before the June launch, NASA and Boeing said repeatedly that they were ready and confident in the mission. “We go through a pretty rigorous process to get here, and really where my source of confidence comes from is going through that process,” Mark Nappi, the head of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, said in May.

In 2014, when NASA first awarded the contracts to develop spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station, some officials in the agency argued against including SpaceX, then a young and somewhat unproven upstart, and pushed to award a single contract to Boeing. NASA leaders said they wanted two providers, but Boeing’s contract was worth significantly more than SpaceX’s – $4.2 billion compared with $2.6 billion – for the same work.

Now Starliner’s future is uncertain. The problems and years-long delays have cost the company about $1.6 billion in cost overruns. Even before the flight, company officials had said they were unsure if they could justify staying with the program.

NASA officials on Saturday publicly praised Boeing as a reliable partner despite their disagreements about Starliner’s current situation. The agency desperately wants Starliner to work, to give it two U.S. spacecraft capable of transporting crews so that if one goes down, there would be a backup alternative besides Russia’s Soyuz.

Williams and Wilmore, officials said, support the decision announced Saturday and will continue to work as part of the crew on the station, where they’ve already completed about 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments.

Although NASA wanted the Starliner mission to go smoothly enough for its crew to return on the same capsule, officials couldn’t let that preference influence their decision once the spacecraft exhibited problems, said Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut and a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University.

“When you have people on board it really changes the way you look at things, and you don’t want to take that risk,” Massimino said.