BOULDER, Colo. — NASA is evaluating options for another test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle before having the vehicle begin regular missions to the International Space Station.
At a briefing after the return of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to complete the Crew-9 mission to the station March 18, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the agency expected another Starliner test flight, with or without people on board, before beginning crew rotation missions with the vehicle.
“What we’d like to do is that one flight and then get into a crew rotation flight,” he said. “So, the next flight up would really test all the changes we’re making to the vehicle, and then the next fight beyond that, we really need to get Boeing into a crew rotation. So, that’s the strategy.”
The changes to Starliner involve modifications to its propulsion system, which suffered helium leaks and thruster failures on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission to the station last year. Those issues were serious enough for NASA to decide to bring Starliner back uncrewed, requiring NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who flew to the station on Starliner for a short-duration stay, to remain on the station through the end of the Crew-9 mission.
“The thing that we need to solidify and go test is the prop system in the service module,” he said. “We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks, eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking.”
That test flight could be an uncrewed mission, but would be able to support crews. “Even if we were to fly the vehicle without a crew in the return,” he said, “we want that to be crew-capable. So, we want it to have all the systems in place that that we could fly a crew with.”
Neither NASA nor Boeing have said much about those efforts since Starliner returned to Earth uncrewed last September. At a separate briefing March 7 before the Crew-10 launch to the station, Stich said that the agency and the company were making “good progress” on those issues, and had closed out 70% of the in-flight anomalies from the CFT mission. The propulsion problems, though, were still being studied, with more testing planned.
He said at the March 18 briefing that he believed Boeing remained committed to Starliner despite the difficulties and the large losses the company has recorded on it. The company reported charges against earnings of more than half a billion dollars on Starliner in 2024, with cumulative charges over the life of the program of just over $2 billion.
“Boeing, all the way up to their new CEO, Kelly [Ortberg], has been committed to Starliner,” he said, citing as evidence the level of effort the company is putting in to test new seals to eliminate helium leaks and “multifaceted” tests of thrusters. “I see a commitment from Boeing to continue the program. They realized that that they have an important vehicle, and we were very close to having the capability that we would like to field.”
Other than the propulsion system, Stich said that Starliner has provided NASA with much of the data needed to certify the vehicle for crewed flights. Any test flight, he said, would be in the “post-certification” phase of Boeing’s current contract, although it was not clear if it would count as one of six such post-certification missions included in that contract.
Stich said there was no rush to decide on the plans for Starliner, including when it could start crew rotation missions. SpaceX will fly the next such mission, Crew-11, which is scheduled for launch as soon as the latter of July. That is driven by plans for a cargo Dragon mission set to launch in August and remain at the station for much of the fall to test its ability to reboost the station.
NASA has not yet decided if Crew-11 will be followed by another Crew Dragon mission, Crew-12, or the first Starliner crew rotation flight. “We probably have a little bit more time, as we get into the summer and understand that the testing we’re going to go do to make that decision,” he said.
