Boeing delays 1st Starliner astronaut launch for NASA indefinitely over parachute, wiring safety issues

People in blue lab coats working on Boeing's blue and white Starliner spacecraft
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is moved to a hazardous processing area at its hangar at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its first crewed launch has been delayed indefinitely. (Image credit: NASA)

Boeing is standing down from the first-ever crewed launch of its Starliner astronaut capsule for NASA, possibly indefinitely, due to safety issues with the spacecraft's parachutes and wiring that were discovered last week. 

The Starliner astronaut launch, already years behind schedule, was most recently targeted to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on July 21. Now, it likely won't launch at all this summer, and may not get off the ground this year.

"It's feasible, but I certainly wouldn't want to commit to any dates or timeframes,"  Mark Nappi, Boeing Starliner program manager and vice president, told reporters in a press conference Thursday (June 1). "We need to spend the next several days understanding what we need to go do to solve these problems." 

Related: Starliner: Boeing's next-generation spaceship for astronauts

Two major safety issues are driving the latest delay, both of them discovered last week during in-depth reviews of Starliner to certify the spacecraft for crewed flight, Nappi said. 

First, Boeing engineers discovered that the "soft links" used on the suspension lines of Starliner's three main parachutes have a failure load limit that is actually lower than previously thought. It turns out that those links, which secure the parachute lines with their anchor tethers on the capsule, cannot handle the load of Starliner if one chute fails. Being able to land safely with two of three chutes is a safety requirement for NASA, Nappi said. 

The second safety issue Boeing found pertains to the protective tape covering the wiring harnesses throughout the Starliner capsule. That tape, Nappi said, is flammable and there are "hundreds" of feet of it inside Starliner.

"It's highly unlikely that we would go in and cut this tape off," Nappi said, adding that doing so would likely cause more potential damage. "So we're looking at solutions that would provide for essentially another type of wrapping over the existing tape in the most vulnerable areas that reduces the risk of fire hazard."

NASA's first crew for the Starliner spacecraft, Crew Flight Test pilot Sunita Williams (left), commander Butch Wilmore and backup pilot Mike Fincke arrive in their blue spacesuits for training at Boeing's Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 18, 2022. (Image credit: NASA)

Boeing's latest Starliner delay follows a string of setbacks for the spacecraft. In December 2019, Boeing's first uncrewed test flight of Starliner failed to reach its proper orbit and could not rendezvous with the International Space Station as planned. It ultimately had to land earlier than intended.

A follow-up NASA investigation ultimately tasked Boeing to make 80 different corrective actions to address safety and other issues with the Starliner spacecraft. The company also had to launch a repeat uncrewed test flight, which successfully reached the space station in May 2022 after its own series of delays over valve issues. The flammable tape issue and the parachute soft links issue were both present on that flight, but the mission was a success, NASA officials said.

Meanwhile, two NASA astronauts — Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore — have been waiting and training to fly Starliner's first crewed flight, called Crew Flight Test. At the start of the year, that test flight was targeted for February, but it has steadily slipped later and later in the months since. In 2021, two other NASA astronauts originally assigned to fly on Starliner, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, were reassigned to fly on SpaceX's Dragon so they could complete their missions. Both have since done so.

In a recent meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, experts raised concerns over Starliner's readiness, particularly its parachute certification since the system flown on the uncrewed test flight was not certified for crewed flight, according to a SpaceNews report

Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, said the entire team feels the pain of yet another delay. 

"I would say everybody is a bit disappointed," Stitch told reporters Thursday, adding that Boeing and NASA engineers discussed the delay together in a meeting this week. "But you could see people ready to go roll up their sleeves and go see what the next steps are."

Boeing is one of two commercial companies picked by NASA to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station through multibillion-dollar fixed-cost contracts with agency's Commercial Crew Program. Due to those fixed-cost agreements, Boeing likely is responsible for any additional costs due to the delays. 

NASA's second pick for commercial crew flights is SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, which has been launching astronauts to the station on its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules since 2020. To date, SpaceX has launched seven crewed flights for NASA and three private flights for customers, most recently the Ax-2 commercial flight to the station for Axiom Space that landed back on Earth on Tuesday (May 30). 

The traffic to and from the International Space Station is tightly packed over the next few months, Stich said, with crew arrivals, departures and cargo missions to the orbiting lab. If Boeing is able to solve its parachute and wiring issues in the next few months, the next window to fly the Starliner crewed flight will be in the fall, he added.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station during the May 2022 Orbital Flight Test 2 mission, an uncrewed test flight. (Image credit: Samantha Cristoforetti/European Space Agency)

Boeing is on the hook for at least seven crewed flights for NASA, including the Crew Flight Test and six operational astronaut missions, as part of its NASA contract. Despite the repeated delays, Nappi said Boeing remains committed to its Starliner spacecraft and fulfilling its NASA obligations. 

"We've been talking about the future of Starliner and how we're going to move forward," Nappi said. "We know that there's growing pains in developing vehicles and flying vehicles ... This is just part of the business to have these kinds of issues."

NASA wants to have two different spacecraft available for astronaut flights so it is not dependent on a single company to fly astronauts in space, Stich added. 

"NASA desperately needs a second provider for transportation," he said. "Our ultimate goal is to have one SpaceX and one Boeing flight per year rotate up to the station."

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Tariq Malik
Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001, first as an intern and staff writer, and later as an editor. He covers human spaceflight, exploration and space science, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009 and Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. In October 2022, Tariq received the Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting from the National Space Club Florida Committee. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast with space historian Rod Pyle on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.

  • gammaboo
    Anyone else see the astronauts doing an Apollo 1 and putting a lemon on top of the "spacecraft"?
    Reply
  • Brad
    Stick a fork in it.
    Reply
  • MicchaelL65
    I wonder what is going through the minds of the astronauts scheduled to fly this thing for the first time? It should be obvious to anyone that this ship ain't gonna fly, but Boeing keeps insisting that everything will be fine - eventually. Starliner is another Challenger or Columbia waiting to happen.

    How did we get to the point where one of the most iconic aerospace companies - Boeing - become so incompetent. It used to be, 'If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going! Now it's, 'If it's Boeing, I ain't going!' Time to put this thing (Starliner) out of its misery.
    Reply
  • Brad
    MicchaelL65 said:
    I wonder what is going through the minds of the astronauts scheduled to fly this thing for the first time? It should be obvious to anyone that this ship ain't gonna fly, but Boeing keeps insisting that everything will be fine - eventually. Starliner is another Challenger or Columbia waiting to happen.

    How did we get to the point where one of the most iconic aerospace companies - Boeing - become so incompetent. It used to be, 'If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going! Now it's, 'If it's Boeing, I ain't going!' Time to put this thing (Starliner) out of its misery.
    One of the saddest days in this country when a company like Boeing becomes this irrelevant.
    Reply
  • Unclear Engineer
    The only good thing about Starliner is that it will (would) land on land instead of splashing down at sea. But, Russia has been doing that for decades, so developing that isn't the real problem with Boeing getting its act together.

    What I would really like to see is Sierra Space's Dream Chaser get mated to a SpaceX reusable launch vehicle, so that we eventually reuse everything we launch, and landings are back on land for boosters and at regular landing strips for astronauts.
    Reply
  • MicchaelL65
    Unclear Engineer said:
    The only good thing about Starliner is that it will (would) land on land instead of splashing down at sea. But, Russia has been doing that for decades, so developing that isn't the real problem with Boeing getting its act together.

    What I would really like to see is Sierra Space's Dream Chaser get mated to a SpaceX reusable launch vehicle, so that we eventually reuse everything we launch, and landings are back on land for boosters and at regular landing strips for astronauts.
    SpaceX Dragon was originally designed to land on land. NASA said, 'No.' I cannot remember what the excuse was. It seemed as if there was some trust issues between NASA and a Private Contractor back then. Obviously NASA and SpaceX have overcome those issues (if they ever existed.)

    Sierra Space has no plans to work with SpaceX, at least as far as I know right now. The plan is to use ULA's Vulcan-Centaur Booster to launch Dream Chaser. I believe that Dream Chaser was to have its first Orbital Test flight later in 2023 That has likely changed due to issues with the Vulcan launch vehicle taking longer than expected.

    There is also a planned European Variant of Dream Chaser that will use the upcoming Arianespace Ariane 6 launcher.
    Reply
  • Unclear Engineer
    Yes, I know the plans as they are, today. But, those plans do not reuse the booster vehicle, so do not have the same potential economies of reusable boosters. And, I don't remember Dream Chaser's current plans getting back to their original goal of it being a crewed vehicle.

    So, what I am saying is that a combination of the reusable booster and the glide-return-to-landing spacecraft concepts seems like a good future goal. It would seem that Dream Chaser could be modified to use SpaceX boosters faster than the Vulcan or Ariane vehicles can be made recoverable/reusable or that SpaceX could develop its own glide-return vehicle.

    But, either way would be a more economical process than fishing SpaceX capsules out of the water or retrieving Boeing capsules from the desert. So, I expect that someday we will get glide-return space craft launched by reusable boosters.
    Reply