Starliner Crew’s 8 Day Trip to ISS May Morph Into 8 Month Stay

Starliner Crew’s 8 Day Trip to ISS May Morph Into 8 Month Stay

The last time we checked on the status of the Boeing Starliner, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) weighed the possibility of using the SpaceX Dragon craft to return the two astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS).

That possibility is looking more like a possibility. Therefore, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are looking at their 8-day trip morphing into a 8-month excursion.

The two astronauts who have already been stuck in space for more than 60 days may have to wait until early 2025 before they can return to Earth — following a trip to the International Space Station that was supposed to last just eight days.

NASA also acknowledged that the astronauts, who arrived on the maiden voyage of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, may have to be rescued by the rival SpaceX CrewDragon, though that vessel won’t be ready until February.

On Wednesday, NASA announced another delay in bringing home Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams during a news conference, with the agency saying it’s now looking more closely at an alternative plan utilizing SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.

If tests in the coming weeks suggest that making the trip home on Starliner proves too risky, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said Wilmore and Williams would have no choice but to hop on Crew-9’s return flight in February 2025.

The decision is not final, but there have been rumblings from the NASA team about Boeing. A lot of trust has been lost, and goodwill has been squandered.

While Boeing has long been one of NASA’s most trusted partners, the space agency’s confidence in the company has languished, according to a person familiar with the thinking of NASA’s leadership.

“They just don’t trust Boeing anymore,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “There’s been lots of times when they said, ‘This is good,’ and it turns out not to be good.”

If NASA abandons Starliner for the return mission and use SpaceX’s Dragon as a rescue craft, it would be another humiliating blow for Boeing. The company’s commercial airliner program has been reeling since fatal 737 Max disasters in 2018 and 2019, and assembly problems have been exposed by an incident this January, when a door panel blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight.

Adding more complexity to an already complex situation, the Starliner undocking software must be rewritten because the crew will likely no longer be onboard when the craft next detaches from the ISS.

Although the capability to undock without a crew exists within the flight software on Starliner, it is currently configured for crew operations. That is, during the process of undocking and moving away from the space station, the flight software takes certain actions, and the crew takes certain actions. This configuration change toward integrated operations between software and crew was made after the previous autonomous flight of Starliner in 2022 that flew to the space station and back.

“Essentially, what we’re asking the team is to go back two years in time and resurrect the software parameters that are required to give automatic responses to breakouts near the ISS should we have problem in close to ISS, which the software now allows them to do manually,” [Steve Stich, NASA Commercial Crew program manager] said. “The team is always updating these mission data loads as different things change.”

No work has been done on the autonomous software package since the flight in 2022. Ars reported it would take about four weeks to complete testing of this configuration change, and Stich confirmed this.

In his recent Substack, Glenn Reynolds reviews the institutional competence crisis, summarizing that when nobody’s life or livelihood is on the line, systems get “soggy.”

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

Hopefully, competence in all the systems will be restored sooner rather than later. I look forward to reporting on the successful return of the Starliner crew—maybe in time for Valentine’s Day.

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