The foundational question isn't really when it will fly a crewed mission. The bigger question is whether Starliner can ever get to fly as well and safely as it was sold. The ISS is in the last years of its life and Starliner is running out of time to get re-designed or fixed.
Word broke today that NASA's office of the Inspector General (OIG) released an audit of the vehicle Tuesday saying that it's looking likely that Starliner won't be certified for operational flights to the International Space Station until next year.
The irony here is that Starliner was first expected to fly in 2017. Yeah, 10 years late. Boeing started working on Starliner years before that.
While the story is covered by both Ars Technica (that link just above) and Space dot com, I'll say here that Space.com might be a better stop, primarily because at the top of their article, they have a full video, nine minutes long, of a talk Administrator Isaacman gave that's good listening. I expect that most readers here are probably fairly familiar with the story of how bad Starliner's Crewed Flight Test went in 2024. Pages have been posted here about it, and this set of search results can re-familiarize you with the story, if needed. Or you can listen to Isaacman's talk hosted at Space.com.
Interestingly and as expected, Isaacman wasn't remotely afraid to place blame for things NASA did wrong, not just what Boeing did. Writing about the OIG, Space.com author Elizabeth Howell noted:
The authors added that underperformance on CFT can be traced to NASA's overconfidence in the spacecraft design, "unrealistic launch and flight test schedules" made by Boeing and accepted by NASA, and "pressure to adhere to this aggressive schedule." And these issues were compounded by NASA not exercising "data rights," which would have let the agency look at "flight-simulation-training failures" that likely would have helped with crew safety ahead of launch.
Before it gets too forgotten, people need to remember that when the Commercial Crew Program was starting in 2014, Boeing got this contract and SpaceX didn't. Everyone expected that the safe bet was Boeing. They had the name, decades of experience contracting to NASA, while SpaceX was an unknown. SpaceX had yet to achieve their first successful booster landing and were just getting started in launching for others. That they would completely beat Boeing, so completely that the Starliner Crew of Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams had to ride a SpaceX Dragon capsule back down and it had become so commonplace that nobody thought about not sending the Dragon for them.
It's not that SpaceX didn't have their own problems, they just solved them years ago - their first booster landing was on December 21, 2015.
NASA concurred with all of OIG's recommendations to the agency going forward, which are:
- Delay payments to Boeing until Starliner's human-rating certification completes;
- Create a schedule with Boeing for the next Starliner flights;
- Document and resolve all of the CFT issues in "NASA's mishap information system" and update the schedule for Starliner with these issues in mind;
- Make private company flight-simulation testing on hardware and software changes accessible to NASA;
- Make NASA's mishap-classification requirements more clear;
- Prioritize NASA hiring efforts to focus on "critical skillsets" related to commercial crew and to the expected decommissioning of the ISS.
In case you've forgotten what a Starliner looks like, this is probably the 20th time I've used this photo of the Starliner that Butch and Sunni rode up to the ISS, docked to its port. Image Credit: NASA
