NASA inspector general suggests Boeing's Starliner will now be a decade late

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Under review

Starliner’s certification may be delayed to 2027, 10 years later than Boeing’s original schedule.

A Starliner crew module is lifted for integration with its service module at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2022.

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Boeing

NASA’s inspector general released an audit Tuesday of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, and it looks increasingly likely that Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule won’t be certified for operational flights to the International Space Station until next year.

That’s just three years before NASA’s official retirement date for the ISS in 2030, though lawmakers in Congress are seeking an extension until 2032. What’s more, declaring Starliner ready for regular crew rotation flights next year would put the Boeing crew capsule a decade behind its original target of 2017.

The inspector general issued six recommendations. NASA officials agreed to all of them. The recommendations include developing a schedule for the next Starliner flight and future crew missions and making sure the schedule is updated to include sufficient time to ensure all of the problems from Starliner’s first test flight with astronauts in 2024 are “resolved and documented.”

This is gonna take a while

In an appendix to the report, NASA officials wrote that they expect to complete these tasks by December 31. The schedule for the launch of the next Starliner mission—now a cargo flight designated Starliner-1—was left unsaid. NASA’s official schedule for missions visiting the ISS indicates the Starliner-1 launch date is “under review.” But the odds of launching Starliner-1 before 2027 look to be diminishing if NASA anticipates it will take until the end of the year to resolve all of the spacecraft’s technical issues and establish a schedule.

Ars has extensively covered Starliner’s technical problems before. Managers reported approximately 100 in-flight anomalies and “observations” on the spacecraft’s Crew Flight Test in 2024, during which Starliner ferried NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for what was supposed to be an eight-day stay.

They ended up staying nine months after NASA determined the capsule was not reliable enough to bring the crew back to Earth. Wilmore and Williams instead returned home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

The investigations into most of the anomalies and observations have been closed, according to a briefing by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel on June 22. But the big ones—Starliner’s helium leaks and overheating control thrusters—remain under investigation, said Kent Rominger, a former Space Shuttle commander and member of NASA’s independent safety panel. “Parachute anomalies remain a risk that requires continued monitoring,” the inspector general reported Tuesday.

“These unresolved technical issues were driven by NASA’s and Boeing’s overconfidence in Boeing’s use of heritage systems, an unachievable schedule, and limited flight simulation data,” the inspector general said.

NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts in 2014 to develop the Starliner and Crew Dragon vehicles to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. At the time, the US space agency relied solely on Russia’s Soyuz vehicle for crew transportation after the retirement of NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet in 2011. Boeing and SpaceX said they expected to begin flying crews to the station for six-month expeditions beginning in 2017. After some delays, NASA certified SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for regular crew rotation missions in 2020.

Meanwhile, Boeing’s Starliner ran into repeated delays. An unpiloted test flight in December 2019 failed to reach the space station, aborted its mission, and came home early. A second test flight in May 2022 achieved its major objectives, leading to the Crew Flight Test in 2024, itself delayed an extra year to allow Boeing to redesign part of the spacecraft’s parachute system and remedy a flammability issue inside Starliner’s crew cabin.

When it became clear that Starliner faced even more delays after the Crew Flight Test (CFT), NASA officials stripped Boeing of two of the six guaranteed crew rotation missions it received under the original 2014 contract, reducing the value of Boeing’s contract by some $500 million. One of the remaining four flights originally slated for crew transportation is now a cargo-only mission. NASA awarded SpaceX additional missions with its Crew Dragon spacecraft to keep the space station fully staffed as Starliner faltered. The inspector general said the agency will have to purchase additional SpaceX flights to cover the station’s crew transportation needs through 2030.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap in February, acknowledging that the test flight was a serious failure. Two of NASA’s senior human spaceflight officials left their posts later that month.

The inspector general reported that “ambiguity in NASA requirements and delays in the appropriate mishap classification hindered the resolution of CFT issues.”

While agreeing with NASA’s decision to fly only cargo on the next Starliner mission, the inspector general wrote that a flight without astronauts would not satisfy all of the agency’s human-rating certification milestones. It also means NASA will have to buy an additional crew transportation mission to cover the services Starliner-1 would have originally provided. This will cost approximately $300 million.

“This decision increases NASA’s costs to maintain a crewed ISS, along with compounding the ongoing delays with certifying the Starliner and reducing the number of contracted crew flights NASA has under (the Commercial Crew contract),” the inspector general wrote.

There are other costs, too. NASA paid SpaceX $17 million to accelerate Crew Dragon flights to fill the gap left by the Starliner delays. The inspector general also questioned nearly $128 million in payments to Boeing since 2019 for the future Starliner-3 crew rotation flight, “a mission that is far from certain.”

Once NASA and Boeing are ready for Starliner to return to flight, Boeing must find a slot in United Launch Alliance’s schedule to fly the Starliner-1 mission on an Atlas V rocket. NASA must also fit Starliner-1 into a busy schedule of missions coming and going at the ISS.

“Furthermore, Boeing is facing additional scheduling constraints, including launch availability, docking port access on the ISS and crew training timelines,” the inspector general wrote. “As a result, the human-rating certification may be delayed to 2027, leaving a limited window of only being able to provide crewed flights to 2030, the planned end of the ISS’s operational life.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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