NASA says Boeing's troubled Starliner space capsule won't fly its two scheduled crew missions to the International Space Station in 2025 and that SpaceX will fly them instead with its proven Dragon capsule.
"The timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established," NASA said in a statement on Tuesday. The agency also said it "is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."
This is bad news for Boeing. What we don't know yet is exactly how bad. To show you what I mean, let me get you up to speed on what's gone wrong so far for Boeing and Starliner.
NASA launched the Commercial Crew Program in 2011 to find an American replacement — or two — for the Russian Soyuz space capsules our ISS crews would have to use after the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet. Despite bureaucratic resistance to hiring an upstart, NASA awarded two contracts — paying Boeing $4.2 billion to develop Starliner and newbie SpaceX $2.6 billion for Dragon Crew.
NASA had planned for a total of 12 manned missions to ISS before the station's retirement in 2030, with six each going to Boeing and SpaceX. After some delays, SpaceX started flying manned Dragon Crew missions in 2020 and NASA contracted them for the full flight (heh) of six missions. Boeing's Starliner has yet to complete a single manned mission to the ISS, although NASA has awarded Boeing three out of its possible six missions.
The other three flights that everyone had initially thought would go to Boeing remain, as it were, up in the air.
Starliner's first unmanned flight test, Orbital Flight Test-1 (OFT-1) failed in 2019. OFT-2 succeeded in 2022, setting the stage for Crew Flight Test (CFT) to ISS earlier this year. That's the mission that had so many anomalies that NASA wasn't comfortable sending astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on Starliner. They're stranded on ISS until SpaceX's half-empty Crew-9 mission returns them home in February. An eight-day stay turned into eight months.
Starliner did end up making it safely back to Earth — unmanned — albeit with various anomalies during the return trip. NASA is trying to decide whether to go ahead and certify Starliner for human spaceflight or if it'll require Boeing to undertake CFT-2 with another pair of (nervous?) astronauts.
The contracts for the development of both spacecraft and the crewed missions were fixed-price. Boeing has lost an estimated $1.6 billion on Starliner. OFT-2 was paid for by Boeing, not us taxpayers, and so would CFT-2, should NASA deem it necessary.
So where does that leave Boeing?
NASA's statement didn't make it clear whether Starliner's extra two flights next year are actually extra or if they're previously contracted missions that got bumped up pending Starliner's fate.
If it's the latter, that means Boeing could still win contracts for those three remaining missions. If it's the former, that means there's just one possible flight slot left for Starliner.
$4.2 billion in taxpayer money plus another $90 million for the one mission... that's an awful lot of money for one space capsule to perform one flight. If there's just one mission left available to Boeing — which they still might lose to SpaceX — I just don't see a way forward from here for Starliner.
Does anyone?
Behind the scenes in our PJ Media Slack channel, my friend and colleague Chris Queen asked me, "Do the Germans or the Japanese have a word for being shocked and not shocked at the same time?"
Not that I know of, but I might be able to help with that.
Schockiertnichtschockiert, anyone?
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