Can the Boeing Starliner bring back its astronauts and its reputation?

The first crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner to the International Space Station was supposed to last just eight days. 

The Starliner lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on June 5 with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams and, after problems with helium leaks and thrusters, docked with the ISS. About a month and a half later, Wilmore and Williams are still on the ISS, doing useful work, but with no return date set as of yet.

The official story from NASA and Boeing is that the Starliner is being kept at the ISS so that engineers can study the malfunctions that plagued the spacecraft’s flight to the orbiting laboratory. When the Starliner returns, the service module, where the malfunctioning equipment resides, will be detached and will burn up in the atmosphere, thus making it unavailable for study.

Wilmore and Williams can stay for more weeks if necessary. Supplies on the space station are plentiful and both astronauts have useful work to do, NASA assures everyone that should it be required, the Starliner astronauts can return to Earth at any time. However, a failure of the thrusters during reentry could result in catastrophe, no matter how unlikely.

What if the Starliner is so compromised that it would not be safe to use it to bring Wilmore and Williams home? 

One idea is that SpaceX would launch a Crew Dragon to rescue them as a last-ditch effort. Boeing would doubtless be embarrassed that its main rival in the Commercial Crew program bailed it out of a problem with the spacecraft it has spent so much time and money developing,

The problem with a Crew Dragon rescue mission is that the second stage malfunctioned during a recent flight of the Falcon 9. The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the Falcon 9 pending an investigation, The incident is affecting numerous planned Falcon 9 launches. SpaceX has already requested a public safety determination to enable an early return to flight.  

If NASA is correct, at some point, the space agency and Boeing will be finished studying what is wrong with the Starliner and, having judged it is safe to bring its astronauts home, will do so. What happens then?

Starliner is clearly a problem-prone, clunky spacecraft that needs to be overhauled if it is to be trusted to ever take astronauts to and from low Earth orbit again. Fixing Starliner will take time and money.

Is it worth trying to fix the Starliner? Or should Boeing and NASA cut their losses?

The problems with the Starliner, which should have been caught and corrected long before human beings were allowed to fly on it, suggest that Boeing has seen better days as an aerospace company capable of creating flight-ready hardware. The company’s problems with some of its airliners indicate a systematic quality control issue that has not been addressed. 

Can Boeing even fix the Starliner, no matter how much time and resources are thrown at the task?

The original principle of the Commercial Crew program, that there must be at least two ways to take astronauts to and from low Earth orbit, still exists. SpaceX’s issues with the Falcon 9 second stage, while likely only temporary, drive that point home.

The only alternative to fixing Starliner is to develop another vehicle that can take people into space besides the Crew Dragon. The Sierra Space Dream Chaser is one possibility, though the cargo version of that spacecraft is not likely to launch for the first time before late 2024 or even early 2025. The crewed version’s advent is farther out in time.

The Indian Gaganyaan spacecraft is another possibility. The spacecraft was developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Its first test flight with a crew is scheduled for some time in 2025.

Neither the crewed version of the Dream Chaser nor the Gaganyaan solves NASA’s immediate problem. No one should want to go hat in hand to the Russians for rides on the Soyuz again, Russia’s bloody war of aggression in Ukraine and its generally hostile attitude toward the West make that option undesirable.

NASA is faced with several bad and risky decisions where access to low Earth orbit is concerned. Solving that conundrum is going to take a lot of skill and some luck.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.