Starliner crew may stay in space until February as Nasa weighs SpaceX option

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, the Nasa astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner, could have their mission extended from eight days to eight months. Photo / Getty Images

Nasa officials said on Wednesday (US time) that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft may not be safe enough to return the crew home and that they could turn to Boeing rival SpaceX for the return much later than originally planned.

If the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) takes that extraordinary route, it could mean Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the Nasa astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner, would have their mission, originally scheduled for about eight days, extended to eight months, to February 2025, when SpaceX’s flight is scheduled to return.

Boeing, however, has made it clear it strongly disagrees with Nasa’s assessment and has maintained the spacecraft is healthy and should be able to complete the flight, Starliner’s first with crew on board. The mission, designed to test how the spacecraft performs with humans in the capsule, already has been stretched out over the past two months as Nasa and Boeing try to determine what caused several thrusters to malfunction during the June flight to the International Space Station.

Boeing was not invited to participate in Wednesday’s briefing but said in a statement it was safe to fly the astronauts home. “We still believe in Starliner’s capability and its flight rationale,” the company said. “If Nasa decides to change the mission, we will take the actions necessary to configure Starliner for an uncrewed return.”

The disagreement has created a highly unusual situation that pits Boeing engineers against those from Nasa as the sides struggle to determine the best way forward.

Ken Bowersox, Nasa’s associate administrator for the space operations mission directorate, described the discussions as productive and said that “reasonable people could pick either” Starliner or SpaceX’s Dragon capsule as the way to return the astronauts.

The teams “were not too far away” from a final decision, Bowersox said, though Nasa is still trying to “drive some more consensus amongst our team”. He added that Nasa has “heard from a lot of folks that had concerns and the decision was not clear”.

But the debate has been stressful, he said.

“I have to admit that sometimes, when we get disagreement, it’s not fun,” Bowersox said. “It can be painful having those discussions, but it’s what makes us a good organisation.”

Nasa, which has repeatedly stressed that safety is paramount, said that it’s still possible for Williams and Wilmore to return on Starliner. But ground tests meant to mimic what happened in space have not definitively demonstrated what caused them to fail, officials said.

“The Nasa community, in general, would like to understand a little bit more of the root cause and the physics,” said Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager.

Nasa has brought in extra propulsion experts from across the agency – including personnel from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Glenn Research Centre and the Goddard Space Flight Centre – “to see if there’s some data that perhaps we have missed”, Stich said.

But in a statement last week, Boeing asserted that the cause of the thruster problem has been found and that it shows Starliner is safe enough: “The data also supports root cause assessments for the helium and thruster issues and flight rationale for Starliner and its crew’s return to Earth.”

While Boeing has long been one of Nasa’s most trusted partners, the space agency’s confidence in the company has languished, according to a person familiar with the thinking of Nasa’s leadership.

“They just don’t trust Boeing any more,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly. “There’s been lots of times when they said, ‘This is good,’ and it turns out not to be good.”

If Nasa abandons Starliner for the return mission and uses SpaceX’s Dragon as a rescue craft, it would be another humiliating blow for Boeing. The company’s commercial airliner programme has been reeling since fatal 737 Max disasters in 2018 and 2019, and assembly problems have been exposed by an incident in January when a door panel blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is years late and has suffered repeated setbacks, from software problems to sticky valves. It had to redo a test flight without crew on board after a major software problem prevented Starliner from reaching the space station in 2019.

During the current mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral on June 5, several thrusters used to orient the spacecraft suddenly shut off as it approached the space station. The propulsion system has also suffered helium leaks.

The delay in returning Starliner and the subsequent tests to figure out what went wrong have been costly for Boeing. In a recent earnings call, the company said it had to take a US$125 million ($207m) charge for the programme, bringing the total amount the company has had to spend out of pocket for various missteps and failures to about US$1.6 billion ($2.65b).

John Shannon, who leads Boeing’s exploration systems division, told the Washington Post last year that the company was having a hard time finding a business case for Starliner and that its future in the programme was uncertain. If Nasa decides Starliner is unfit to fly Wilmore and Williams home, some in the space agency fear the company would bow out, meaning Nasa would only have SpaceX as a domestic supplier of crew transport to the space station.

The space shuttle Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts died when the shuttle came apart while flying back to Earth in 2003, remains in the back of Nasa leaders’ minds, said Wayne Hale, a longtime Nasa flight director.

“Those senior leaders lived through Columbia and don’t want to repeat those mistakes, and that’s why I have a great deal of confidence they’ll make the right decision,” he said in an interview.

He added that while there is pressure on Boeing’s bottom line, Nasa would not factor that in its decision-making.

“Boeing needs a win from a corporate standpoint,” Hale said. “But whatever influence they have will not override the people making the safety decisions. That’s not going to happen.”