Is There a Future for Boeing’s Starliner After Failed Mission?

Boeing made little mention of the two empty spacesuits that returned with the Starliner spacecraft when it thumped down in New Mexico without crew on Friday, Sept. 6, at 10:01 p.m. M.D.T., after three months docked to the International Space Station (ISS). U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams wore the blue suits when they went aloft aboard the ship on June 5 for what was supposed to be just an eight-day station stay. But they don’t need those suits anymore.

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After Starliner developed thruster problems and leaks in the helium system that keeps the thruster system pressurized, NASA decided that the ship could not be trusted to carry Williams and Wilmore home safely. They will return instead in February aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft wearing the white suits adapted to the Dragon ships. 

The Starliner suits would have been useless ballast aboard the ISS and so they came home aboard what became, effectively, a useless spacecraft. If there was a more potent metaphor for Boeing’s failure to deliver the goods on this first crewed mission of its brand new ship, it was hard to think of one. Now the question arises as to what went wrong aboard Starliner and whether the spacecraft has a future at all.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding,” wrote Boeing executives in a company-wide memo, “we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed.”

Maybe, but that pride may be misplaced. The company clearly will continue to play a role at NASA. It is the prime contractor for key components of the space agency’s giant Space Launch System moon rocket. But the Starliner part of the Boeing portfolio could go by the boards. 

It was in 2014 that NASA tapped both Boeing and SpaceX to build new spacecraft to ferry crews to the ISS, taking over the job from the space shuttles, which were retired in 2011. The total amount of the contract was $6.8 billion, but as the legacy company of the pair, Boeing got the lion’s share, at $4.2 billion. The goal was for both ships to begin flying by 2017—a target neither one met. SpaceX missed the mark by three years, not carrying crew until a test flight in May 2020. Boeing stumbled in its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, successfully getting Starliner to Earth orbit but failing to dock with the station after a faulty mission clock caused the spacecraft to burn its thrusters for too long, exhausting too much fuel. A later uncrewed flight in 2022 was successful, and Starliner was cleared to fly three months ago, with astronauts in its seats.

From NASA’s point of view, it was always important to have two different spacecraft at the ready to make station runs. 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 to space. When the shuttles were retired, NASA was reduced to buying seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft at a price-gouging cost of $90 million each. (SpaceX, by comparison, charges a reported $50 million per passenger aboard its Dragon.) The twin awards in the 2014 contract sought to ensure that NASA was never again dependent on just a single American launcher.

“The dissimilar redundancy to ISS has been an important part of our program plans since the award of the contract and it’s an important part of our safety going forward,” said NASA associate administrator Jim Free at an April 2024 press conference to discuss the Starliner launch.

Originally, Starliner had the potential for an indefinite life, with the ship not only flying to the ISS, but also launching private crews on non-station missions, the way 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 most recent mess, the serial Starliner delays led Boeing to see a less-ambitious future for its ship. The ISS is aging, with its first component going into service 26 years ago, and NASA plans to deorbit the outpost in 2030. With two crews launching to the ISS per year, that leaves, at best, six more station missions for SpaceX and six more for Boeing—but should Starliner even fly again?

“We’re on contract for seven or six flights,” said Mark Nappi, manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, at the April press conference. “That carries us out to the end of the decade, and so we’ve got plenty of time to think about what’s after that.”

Boeing may not even get that limited number of missions. In August, NASA administrator Bill Nelson told a press conference that he was “100% certain” that Starliner would fly with crew again. After Friday’s landing, Steve Stich,  manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, was equally sanguine. “We are excited to have Starliner home safely,” he said. “This was an important test flight for NASA in setting us up for future missions on the Starliner system.” The problem is, before Starliner can fly again, Boeing will have to fix what ailed the just-returned ship, and that won’t be so easy to do. 

The spacecraft’s faulty thrusters were located in a portion of the ship known as the service module—a section that is jettisoned and burns up in the atmosphere before reentry. That makes it impossible for engineers to do any kind of forensic testing on the spacecraft to determine the cause of the thruster malfunctions. Telemetry from the spacecraft when it was still docked to the station suggested that the problem might be connected to overheating of the thrusters, causing seals to swell and jam—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 the rising costs. The company has not only burned through the $4.2 billion NASA handed over in 2014, but has taken an additional $1.6 billion in charges over the life of the program, including over $250 million in the second quarter of 2023 alone. At the same time, Boeing has faced serious—indeed, deadly—problems on its commercial aviation side, 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 during flight in January, 2024. On Sept. 3, Boeing’s stock tumbled 7.3% following Wells Fargo’s decision to downgrade the company to an underweight rating. All by itself, the move slashed 84 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average for that trading session. 

It will cost an untold amount of additional money to fix the Starliner’s thruster problems—even assuming engineers can pinpoint the cause of the breakdown without the service module to examine. That could take the same three years it took Boeing to fix the problem that occurred in the 2019 flight—eating up half of the remaining years the station has to live. With SpaceX having launched 13 successful crewed missions since 2020—nine for NASA and four for private customers—the space agency may well decide that dissimilar redundancy is just not achievable, at least not with Starliner as one of the two ships. The Challenger and Columbia disasters left NASA much more risk-averse than it was in the past—which played a role in the decision to fly the latest Starliner home empty.

“I think we’ve worked a lot harder these days in synthesizing everyone to make sure that we have the right environment for people with different positions [on safety] to bring them forward,” said Russ DeLoach, chief of NASA safety and mission assurance, in August. “I recognize that that may mean at times, we don’t move very fast because we’re getting everything out.”

For now, Boeing is putting the best face it can on the Starliner failure. “A good landing. Pretty awesome,” said the company’s mission control commentator after the Friday touch down. But NASA is being candid that nothing is guaranteed for the glitchy ship. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us that we wish it would have been the way we planned it [with crew aboard],” said Stich. “What we really need to do is look at the things that didn’t perform the way we expected.”