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.
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 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 have 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 over its history.
NASA leaders said the decision 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 a list of 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.
In an internal email Saturday, a Boeing executive told employees that the company would work with NASA to ensure the uncrewed Starliner comes back safely.
“I know this is not the decision we hoped for, but we stand ready to carry out the action’s necessary to support NASA’s decision,” wrote Mark Nappi, the head of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. “The focus remains first and foremost on the safety of the crew and spacecraft.”
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.
Starliner’s June test flight was the spacecraft’s first with humans on board. If all had gone well, NASA would have certified Starliner for regular crew rotation missions, carrying four astronauts for six-month stays on the station. But now it is unclear whether or how Starliner might get certified for those flights.
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 2021. 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,” Boeing’s Nappi said in May. “We work very, very closely with NASA, with everything we do from the factory floor to the software to all of our engineering design and our certification products. And we’ve come to the point where we are all in total agreement.”
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, however, desperately wants Starliner to work so that it has two U.S. spacecraft capable of transporting crews to the station. Having two U.S. sources would ensure that if one goes down, there would be a backup alternative besides Russia’s Soyuz.