By all accounts, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has been nothing short of a disaster. It’s cost NASA a staggering amount of money, and even after over a decade of development, the capsule still has yet to complete a crewed mission to the International Space Station.
It’s been a humiliating saga, including a failed uncrewed launch attempt that went haywire thanks to a glitching computer, an aborted mission which stranded two NASA astronauts on board the station for nine months, and a litany of technical headaches along the way.
But now that SpaceX is threatening to retire its Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA could soon be forced to make the plagued spacecraft work whether it likes to or not — while also calling into question its entire access to space.
“I do not think it’s a secret that SpaceX intends to sunset older platforms like Falcon and Dragon as they concentrate on their next-generation capability, Starship,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters on Monday.
The agency said that it was weighing the option of buying two additional launches on Boeing’s Starliner.
Without SpaceX’s workhorse Crew Dragon spacecraft, which has regularly delivered crews to the ISS for six years now, NASA’s options could soon run thin. Starliner, which has cost Boeing billions of dollars, came eerily close to getting the axe altogether in 2024, but with SpaceX threatening to abandon its existing launch platforms in favor of its enormous and still unproven Starship, the space agency seemingly saw the writing on the wall.
NASA is also now stuck with the bill. The agency announced this week that it will commit $359 million to bail out Boeing and help it rebuild its reaction control system thrusters, arguably the biggest source of the spacecraft’s woes during its last, ill-fated mission.
The space agency will also need to certify the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket for crewed missions ahead of the retirement of the Atlas V.
The goal is to launch Starliner no earlier than December of this year. NASA also already has three pre-existing contracts for crewed missions with Boeing, per Ars Technica.
“We are starting with an uncrewed Starliner-1 mission to the International Space Station to validate the improvements made to the spacecraft and gather the flight data we need,” Isaacman said in a statement. “From there, we will use what we learn, continue implementing the corrective actions identified by our Program Investigation Team, and complete the testing and certification required for crewed flight.”
“Our current plan is to return astronauts on Starliner-2 by 2028,” he added.
It’s an awkward transitional moment for the agency. The ISS is set to be retired by the end of this decade, leaving a glaring hole in access to our planet’s orbit. It’s still unclear what will eventually replace the aging orbital outpost, with multiple private companies vying for lucrative government contracts to launch their own habitats.
If it were up to NASA, Boeing’s Starliner would probably be part of that vision — but given what we’ve seen so far, it’s anything but guaranteed.
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