Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will fly astronauts again — but not until 2028.
If all goes according to plan, Starliner will conduct an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station (ISS) this coming December or January, then carry astronauts up sometime in 2028, NASA announced in an update today (Sept. 28).
It's a vote of confidence for a vehicle that has experienced some serious setbacks on its three test flights to date.
Starliner lifted off for the first time in December 2019, on an uncrewed mission to the ISS called Orbital Flight Test (OFT). The capsule failed to meet up with the orbiting lab, however; it got stranded in the wrong orbit after suffering problems with its onboard timing system.
Starliner made it to the ISS on the uncrewed OFT-2, which launched in May 2022. But it wasn't a perfectly smooth ride: The Boeing vehicle overcame the failure of two of its orbital maneuvering and attitude control thrusters while it chased down the station.
Then came Crew Flight Test (CFT), Starliner's first-ever astronaut mission. CFT launched in June 2024, sending NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the ISS for a planned 10-day stay. Shortly after Starliner deployed from its rocket, however, some issues cropped up — namely, helium leaks and the failure of five of Starliner's 28 reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.
As on OFT-2, Starliner powered through and made it safely to the ISS. But NASA eventually decided not to risk sending Williams and Wilmore back down to Earth on the vehicle. Starliner returned uncrewed in September 2024, and the two astronauts stayed on the ISS for six months beyond that, finally riding home in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule the following March.
Starliner has been grounded ever since, while SpaceX continues to rack up astronaut missions for NASA. The agency gave commercial crew contracts to both companies in 2014. SpaceX successfully flew its version of CFT in 2020 and is now wrapping up its 12th operational astronaut flight to the ISS for NASA; that mission will end shortly after SpaceX's Crew-13 launches this coming Thursday (Oct. 1).
NASA has long stressed the importance of having more than one private astronaut taxi up and running, however, so it has remained invested in Starliner's success — even after declaring CFT a "Type A mishap," the most serious kind, this past February.
And a joint Boeing-NASA team has addressed the issues that beset CFT, agency officials told us today. For example, the company traced the helium leaks to valve problems — specifically, degradation that occurred after exposure to nitrogen tetroxide, the oxidizer in Starliner's propulsion system.
"That is why the material of the seal was changed," Dana Weigel, manager, of NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program, said during a press conference today.
"We also realized we needed to select seals that were on the larger side of the tolerance spectrum," she added. "Boeing has implemented all of those changes on the Starliner-1 spacecraft already."
Starliner-1 is the upcoming uncrewed test flight to the ISS. Starliner-2 is the crewed mission that's targeted to lift off in 2028 — likely in the middle of that year, Boeing representatives said today.
Engineers have also taken steps to ensure that a CFT-like thruster anomaly doesn't afflict future Starliner flights.
"We determined that the crew module thruster anomaly is the result of corrosion," Weigel said.
"This is created by residual hydrazine propellant combined with atmospheric exposure — specifically, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and so Boeing has put in place procedures to flush out the hydrazine, and also to flow a continuous purge to isolate those thrusters from the environment," she added.
Not all of these changes will be tested on Starliner-1, which explains why there will be such a long gap between it and Starliner-2.
"Following the flight [Starliner-1], NASA and Boeing will complete the service module thruster valve design modification," agency officials said in a statement today.
"Boeing also will implement other improvements across the spacecraft, including installation of new crew module thrusters, batteries and minor modifications to the parachute system for increased performance and reliability in support of system certification," they added.
We already know one person who's flying on Starliner-2: NASA announced today that veteran agency astronaut Woody Hoburg will command the mission. (There's no word yet on his crewmates.)
Hoburg expressed confidence in Starliner and the Boeing-NASA teams that will be working on the vehicle in the leadup to Starliner-2.
"I've flown a lot of types of aircraft, and let me tell you, Starliner is a pilot's spacecraft," he said during today's press conference. "Starliner gives the crew real capabilities to respond to off-nominal events. These were exercised during CFT, and along with our expert flight control team, the manual control capabilities on Starliner were critical to achieving a safe docking despite numerous thruster failures."
Boeing's commercial crew contract currently runs through Starliner-6. Starliner-1 through Starliner-4 will launch atop United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rockets, as OFT, OFT-2 and CFT all did. But the venerable Atlas V is out of production and on the road to retirement, so Starliner-5 and Starliner-6 will have a different rocket ride — ULA's new Vulcan Centaur.
Vulcan still hasn't been certified to launch crewed missions, however, so some work will be required on that end as well. And NASA will be footing some of the bill.
"So, both the spacecraft upgrades — including the thrusters and everything you've heard summarized today — plus the Vulcan certification, that is $359 million [dollars]," Weigel said during the press conference.
Today's Starliner update came on the heels of some other commercial crew news. On Sept. 19, NASA announced that it has awarded SpaceX $946 million to fly three additional ISS astronaut missions: Crew-15, Crew 16 and Crew-17, which are all expected to launch by 2030.
SpaceX plans to retire Crew Dragon and its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket around that same time. The company thinks its fully reusable Starship megarocket will be humming along by then, taking care of all its spaceflight needs.
That may well be the case: Starship reached orbit for the first time ever today, deploying the first 26 satellites for SpaceX's planned 100,000-strong Starlink V3 megaconstellation.
