Boeing made little mention of the two empty spacesuits that returned with the Starliner spacecraft when it landed uncrewed in New Mexico at 10:01 p.m. MDT on Friday, Sept. 6, after a three-month berth at the International Space Station (ISS). U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams wore the blue suits when they boarded the ship on June 5 for what was supposed to be an eight-day stay at the station. But they won't need them anymore.
After Starliner developed thrust problems and leaks in the helium system that keeps the thrust system pressurized, NASA decided the ship could not be trusted to bring Williams and Wilmore home safely. Instead, they will return in February aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, wearing the white suits customized for the Dragon ships.
The Starliner suits would have been useless ballast aboard the ISS, and so they came home aboard what became, in effect, a useless spaceship. If there were a more potent metaphor for Boeing's failure to deliver the goods on this first crewed mission of its brand-new ship, it's hard to think of one. Now the question arises as to what went wrong aboard Starliner, and whether the spaceship even has a future.
"While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight ending," Boeing executives wrote in a companywide memo, "we support NASA's decision for Starliner and are proud of the accomplishments of our team and spacecraft."
Perhaps, but that pride may be misplaced. The company will clearly continue to play a role at NASA. It is the prime contractor for key components of the agency's massive Space Launch System moon rocket. But the Starliner part of Boeing's portfolio could be a potential letdown.
In 2014, NASA tapped both Boeing and SpaceX to build new spacecraft to ferry crews to the ISS, taking over from the space shuttles, which were retired in 2011. The total contract was for $6.8 billion, but as the pair's legacy company, Boeing got the lion's share, at $4.2 billion. The goal was for both ships to fly in 2017, a target neither met. SpaceX missed its target by three years, only carrying crew during a test flight in May 2020. Boeing stumbled in its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, successfully launching Starliner into orbit but failing to dock with the space station after a faulty mission clock caused the spacecraft to burn its thrusters for too long, consuming too much fuel. A later unmanned flight in 2022 was successful and Starliner was cleared to fly three months ago, with astronauts in the seats.
From NASA's perspective, it was always important to have two different spacecraft ready to go into space. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003 immediately, if temporarily, grounded the shuttles, the U.S. had no way to get crews into space. When the shuttles were retired, NASA was forced to buy seats aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft at an exorbitant price of $90 million apiece. (SpaceX, by comparison, charges $50 million per passenger aboard its Dragon.) The dual awards in the 2014 contract were intended to ensure that NASA would never again have to rely on just one U.S. launch vehicle.
"The uneven redundancy of the ISS has been a key part of our program plans since the contract was awarded and it is an important part of our security going forward," said NASA Deputy Space Flight Administrator Jim Free during an April 2024 press conference to discuss the Starliner launch.
Starliner originally had the potential for an indefinite lifespan, flying not only to the ISS but also launching private crews on off-station missions, as SpaceX launched the all-civilian Inspiration4 crew in 2021 and is poised to launch the similar Polaris Dawn mission this week. But even before the latest mess, Starliner's successive delays had Boeing eyeing a less ambitious future for its ship. The ISS is aging, with its first component commissioned 26 years ago, and NASA plans to deorbit the outpost in the 2030s. With two crews launching to the ISS per year, that leaves at best six additional station missions for SpaceX and six for Boeing - but should Starliner fly again at all?
"We have a contract for seven or six flights," Mark Nappi, manager of Boeing's commercial crew program, said at the April news conference. "That takes us through the end of the decade, so we have plenty of time to think about what comes next."
Boeing may not even get that limited number of missions. In August, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a news conference that he was "100 percent confident" that Starliner would fly with crew again. After the landing on Friday, Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, was similarly optimistic. "We're glad to have Starliner home safely," he said. "This was an important test flight for NASA to prepare us for future missions on the Starliner system." The problem is that before Starliner can fly again, Boeing will have to fix whatever was wrong with the newly returned ship, and that won't be easy.
The spacecraft's failed thrusters were in a part of the ship known as the service module, a section that is jettisoned and burns up in the atmosphere before reentering the atmosphere. That makes it impossible for engineers to do forensic tests on the spacecraft to determine the cause of the thruster failure. Telemetry from the spacecraft while it was still docked with the space station suggested the problem may have been related to the thrusters overheating, causing their seals to swell and seize. But what the data suggested and what actually went wrong could be two different things.
The big problem for Boeing is both the ticking clock and rising costs. The company has not only burned through the $4.2 billion it handed NASA in 2014, but has also racked up another $1.6 billion in costs over the life of the program, including more than $250 million in the second quarter of 2023 alone. At the same time, Boeing has faced serious - even deadly - problems in commercial aviation, after two crashes of its 737 line - one in 2018 and one in 2019 - claimed 346 lives and a door blew off a 737 Max jet in flight in January 2024. On Sept. 3, Boeing shares fell 7.3% after Wells Fargo decided to downgrade the company to an underweight rating. The move alone knocked 84 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average for that trading session.
Fixing the Starliner's booster problems will cost an untold amount of additional money, even if engineers can figure out the cause of the failure without having to examine the service module. That could cost the same three years it took Boeing to fix the problem that occurred during the 2019 flight, consuming half of the space station's remaining service life. Now that SpaceX has launched 13 successful crewed missions since 2020, nine for NASA and four for private customers, the space agency may decide that unequal redundancy simply isn't feasible, at least not with Starliner as one of its two ships. The Challenger and Columbia disasters have made NASA much more risk-averse than in the past, a factor in the decision to fly the newest Starliner home empty.
"I think we've been working a lot harder lately to synthesize everyone and make sure we have the right environment for people in different positions. [on safety] "We are trying to get them out there," Russ DeLoach, NASA Safety and Mission Assurance director, said in August. "I realize that sometimes that means we don't move very quickly because we're pulling out all the stops."
Boeing is now putting the best face on the Starliner failure. "A good landing. Pretty awesome," the company's mission control commentator said after the landing on Friday. But NASA is candid that nothing is guaranteed for the faltering ship. "We're all happy about the successful landing, but there's also a part of us that wishes it had gone the way we planned it to. [with crew aboard]", Stich said. "What we really need to do is look at the things that didn't perform as we expected."
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected].
