In a statement released Monday, NASA announced that it has scoped back its original deal with Boeing for its Starliner spacecraft. This isn’t the most surprising news ever: the Starliner spectacularly failed its first crew test, stranding two astronauts aboard the International Space Station for over nine months. While NASA hasn’t abandoned the project, it will now only ask for four missions from Boeing hardware rather than the originally proposed six. It will still retain the other two flights as options should things go well.
The first full mission will launch no earlier than April 2026, carrying only cargo, not crew. If that’s successful, then the following three missions are expected to be crewed. That will be good news, and not just for Boeing, since it’s better to have multiple ways to get to the station. Currently, only the SpaceX Dragon capsule flies there, delivered via a Falcon 9 rocket. Having “dissimilar redundancy” is important in case one of those options goes wrong. Problem is, Boeing’s proposed second option, the Starliner, is what went wrong.
Marooned in space
Back in 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a $4.5 billion contract for its Starliner proposal. Ten years later and $2 billion overbudget, the capsule finally docked with the ISS with crew onboard. Good news! Except that it was nearly a disaster, with multiple failing thrusters causing the astronauts to lose control of the vehicle on approach. But the Starliner was in bad shape, and nobody trusted it to bring the astronauts safely back home, turning their ten-day mission into a nine-month stay.
The failed thrusters endangered the entire ISS, since the craft might lose control and crash into the station once it cast off. In the end, however, the capsule did safely leave and return to Earth; in fact, given how well the landing went, it turns out the crew could have flown home on it after all, per Space.com. That said, new issues emerged during descent, and nobody wants to risk lives in that kind of environment.
During a year that was bad for Boeing all around, Starliner’s failure was perhaps its most public and embarrassing (except for that 737 door panel blowing out… yeah it was a bad year). Despite it all, the Starliner capsule pushes onwards. It ought to be putting astronauts on the ISS again in the next few years. Who knows, maybe it will even return them home.
