SpaceX will bring home the two astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station for the past two months due to problems with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, NASA announced Saturday.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the decision, which followed a formal review on Saturday, was driven by the agency's commitment to safety, especially after the loss of 14 astronauts in the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 2003 Columbia disaster on its return to Earth.
“Remember that this whole debate is framed in the context that we have made mistakes in the past,” Nelson said at a news conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Spaceflight is risky, even in its safest and most routine forms. And a test flight, by its nature, is neither safe nor routine.”
NASA’s decision to bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule in February follows months of irregularities that have hampered the third test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which began even before its June 5 launch.
The result is a blow not only to Boeing, whose Starliner program is years behind schedule, but to NASA, which in 2014 awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to the company and rival SpaceX to service the space station with crew and cargo.
Since 2020, Elon Musk's Hawthorne company has flown more than half a dozen crews there aboard its Crew Dragon capsule, while Boeing has only managed two remote flights before the June one, including one in May 2022 that docked with the orbiting lab.
NASA said Saturday that Starliner will return to Earth remotely next month. The SpaceX mission that will bring Wilmore and Williams home is scheduled to launch Sept. 24.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, responded to the announcement with a post on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. “SpaceX stands ready to support NASA in any way we can,” she said.
Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, said the decision was the result of inconclusive ground testing of the boosters after they failed when Starliner docked with the space station on June 6.
“As we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data, it became very clear to us that the best way to proceed was to return Starliner uncrewed,” he said. “If we had a model, if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do … I think we would have taken a different course of action.”
The problems plaguing Starliner have been an embarrassment for Boeing, which is still grappling with an investigation into a door stopper that exploded during a flight of a 737 Max 9 this year to Ontario International Airport in San Bernardino County. That followed two crashes of its 737 Max 8 jets several years ago that severely damaged its safety reputation.
This month alone, Boeing wrote off $125 million in Starliner-related expenses after previously reporting cost overruns of about $1.5 billion.
Nelson said Saturday that he briefed Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, on the decision and that the executive pledged to work with the agency to resolve the issues with Starliner. Nelson said that would give the agency the “redundancy” it wanted to service the station.
In a statement released Saturday, Boeing said: “We continue to focus first and foremost on the safety of the crew and the spacecraft. We are executing the mission as determined by NASA and are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”
For years, NASA had to rely solely on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to send American astronauts to the station after the space shuttle program ended in 2011. NASA plans to continue partnering with the Russian program, which along with the United States was the primary builder of the orbiting laboratory that first launched in 1998.
The latest Starliner mission, which was expected to last about a week, was plagued with problems.
The capsule was originally scheduled to launch on May 6, but the flight was canceled due to a valve malfunction on the Atlas V rocket that launches it into space. Other launch dates were not finalized after a helium leak was detected in the propulsion system that propels Starliner into space.
Helium pressurizes the system's rocket fuel, but NASA and Boeing officials decided the leak wasn't serious and developed software solutions to fix it. However, the leak grew larger as the spacecraft approached and docked with the space station the next day.
More worryingly, the propulsion system's thruster motors malfunctioned during the docking procedure.
Ground tests last month by NASA on an identical booster found that the Teflon used to control the flow of the rocket's propellant eroded under high-heat conditions, while different seals that control helium gas showed bulges.
NASA officials have maintained that Starliner has 10 times more helium than it needs to return to Earth and that the craft could be used if an emergency situation arose aboard the space station. This month, Boeing issued a statement citing all the tests it had conducted and concluded: “Boeing remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft and its ability to safely return the crew.”
The aging space station is scheduled to be retired in 2030. In June, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to build a craft that would safely push the station out of orbit so it can burn up in the atmosphere, with any loose pieces landing in remote areas of the ocean.
The problems plaguing Starliner mean that if it ever receives clearance from the agency to send crews to the space station, it will serve for far fewer years. But Boeing has said it wants to use the craft to service the commercial space station being developed by Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin.
Unlike Space X’s Crew Dragon capsule, which lands on water, Starliner will land in the Arizona or New Mexico desert using a parachute-based ground landing, as pioneered by the Soviets decades ago. That makes it easier to prepare the reusable craft for another launch.
However, the propulsion system will be discarded in space, so NASA and Boeing engineers will not have a chance to take it apart and examine exactly what went wrong.
