Will Starliner become the replacement for Crew Dragon?

As we all settle back down to "normal" after Starship Flight 14, some news broke yesterday related to a big problem lying out there in the future somewhere. SpaceX has said they're going to retire Falcon 9 by 2030, and with it the Crew Dragon flights to the ISS. This is also going to impact another problem in economic expansion into space, one we talked about back in July: the world - probably surprisingly to many - is facing a shortage of launch capacity. Yes, the world is going to lose access to low cost Falcon 9 missions, including ridesharing missions that are the low cost leaders.

In the weeks before Flight 14 a story surfaced that Boeing and NASA were looking to resurrect Starliner as a work around for more flights to the ISS.

Yesterday, that story was updated on both Ars Technica and Space.com. Both state, without much specificity of date, that Starliner is going to do an uncrewed test flight sometime probably this coming December '26 or January '27. A crewed flight test is going to be needed but is more likely to fly in 2028. 

Back on Sept.18, the story broke that NASA had ordered three more SpaceX manned flights to the Space Station. 

On Friday, Sept 18, NASA awarded SpaceX $946 million to fly three more crewed missions to the International Space Station (ISS), a "period of performance" that runs through 2030. 

"As part of the agency's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract, this change brings the total missions for SpaceX to 17 and helps NASA to maintain access to the space station with two unique commercial crew industry partners," NASA officials said in a statement on Friday (Sept. 18).

As we've talked about many times, at the start of the commercial crew program, NASA awarded a big contract to the company that everyone expected to do everything: Boeing. Since they were required to pick two contractors, they also awarded a contract to the brash startup, SpaceX, that had never done anything like developing a space capsule, man-rated, and capable of performing the missions. The score here in the fourth quarter is SpaceX has launched 13 crewed missions while Boeing has launched "zero point zero." Mission 14 is currently set for Thursday morning, October 1, at 11:10 AM EDT. It's all online chatter ("slop?") but every astronaut's comment I've read says the Dragon is a dream to ride in and to fly, while none of the other options (still including Russian Soyuz capsules and ground training simulators of Starliner) rate mention.

[NASA] has invested $5.1 billion to date in Boeing to develop the Starliner spacecraft. Despite this, Boeing has yet to fly a single operational mission to the space station. The news this week is that, despite these struggles, NASA will invest $359 million more to support the company’s efforts to fix Starliner’s propulsion system and certify the Vulcan rocket for new missions. It is NASA’s hope that Starliner can supplement astronaut missions during the remainder of the International Space Station’s lifetime, and then be available for private space station operators.

2021 photo of Boeing's first Starliner capsule to fly taken three years before the awful 2024 flight that was cut, turning a "two week" test to the ISS into nine months on the station for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Image credit: Boeing

There are more aspects to this story. There are people advocating for another Commercial Crew program like the one that led to Starliner and Dragon. It isn't gathering lots of interest - my guess is NASA says they don't have the time for that. An outside chance is Blue Origin. Yeah, them. To quote from Eric Berger at Ars Technica:

The space company founded by Jeff Bezos is developing a “Space Vehicle” for astronauts to launch on the New Glenn rocket. After some of my recent reporting, sources reached out to let me know that design work is “well advanced” along with demonstration work such as cabin pressure-vessel manufacturing, extensive parachute testing, in-house thermal protection system testing, life support systems, and more. I’ve heard “no earlier than” dates of 2031 for a crew launch. But that’s probably optimistic, and if NASA and private space station operators need to book transport in the early 2030s, Starliner is probably the only option. 

Berger comes to the conclusion that if we need a replacement for the Crew Dragon, the most likely vehicle we know of to succeed is Starship. 

You’re probably not going to like this, but the only real hope for a significantly lower sticker price for sending humans into low-Earth orbit is Starship. If incentivized, SpaceX probably could bring this capability online by 2030 and radically reshape the market. But from all publicly available evidence, and based on private conversations, SpaceX seems unlikely to prioritize crewed ascent and reentry on Starship any time soon. Could that change? Certainly. Will it? Probably not. SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, will do what they want.