The failure of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has left two astronauts stuck in space for months – but also proved how private spaceflight can go right
By Leah Crane
28 August 2024
Boeing’s Starliner capsule won’t shuttle astronauts home from space this year
NASA
It’s official: Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are staying on the International Space Station (ISS) until at least February. This is a major setback for Boeing’s Starliner, the capsule that brought them there, but it doesn’t spell doom for the US space programme. Instead, it highlights the success of the move from governments providing the only rockets to space to the proliferation of commercial spaceflight options.
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This is exactly the contingency NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which uses spacecraft built by private companies to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, was planned to handle. “Commercial Crew purposefully chose two providers for redundancy in case of exactly this kind of situation,” says Laura Forczyk, an independent consultant in the space industry. The two NASA astronauts were initially supposed to return to Earth about a week after they arrived at the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule on 5 June. But due to problems with the spacecraft, they will now stay for an extended mission before coming home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft instead of Starliner.
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“If they had only selected one provider, it would have been Boeing, because SpaceX was the risky prospect at the time,” says Forczyk. “So in a way, this is a triumph of the Commercial Crew Program.”
This mission was Starliner’s first crewed test flight, and it was rocky from the start. Leaky valves and thruster failures during the journey into space forced NASA and Boeing to reconsider whether the craft would be safe to shuttle the astronauts home. They ran tests of the thrusters on the ground, and the results were inconclusive – there was still some risk of the thrusters failing on the way home.
The safest backup plan is for the astronauts to stay on the ISS until SpaceX’s tried-and-true Crew Dragon capsule has room to bring them home in early 2025. In the meantime, Starliner will autonomously undock from the ISS in September and return to Earth without crew, and Boeing engineers will continue troubleshooting.