NASA’s Stranded Astronauts Will Fly Home on SpaceX’s Dragon

Two NASA astronauts stranded in space since early June finally have their flight home booked: they will return to Earth on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule in February.

The decision represents a vote of confidence in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which not only won the race to ferry astronauts with a yearslong lead but is now being trusted to finish a job that Boeing started. The two spacefarers, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, launched on June 5 on a mission that was never guaranteed to be an uneventful flight; they were the first passengers to ever fly onboard the Starliner vehicle, built by veteran contractor Boeing. Now their mission will be more complicated than originally planned—and months longer than anyone expected.

“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson during a news conference that the agency held on Saturday. “A test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine.”

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Wilmore and Williams also faced several delays ahead of their launch. When they finally did blast off, they reached the International Space Station (ISS) safely. But the flight included several small anomalies, particularly helium leaks and thruster failures in the vehicle’s propulsion system. Since the two arrived in orbit, NASA and Boeing have been intensively troubleshooting their vehicle, a capsule nicknamed Calypso.

But NASA remains unsatisfied that engineers particularly understand the thruster situation well enough to entrust the agency’s astronauts to the vehicle. Every NASA team that officials said had been polled about Starliner’s return—representing about a dozen offices in all—opted for an uncrewed flight, said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for space operations at NASA, during the press conference. “There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” added Steve Stich, program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

For NASA, the decision represents a setback to its plans for having two reliable crew vehicles that can routinely carry astronauts into space. But despite the awkward optics of the new arrangement, changing the return ride for Wilmore and Williams beats the alternative, says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a political scientist at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

“The hit would have been worse if they had made a decision that put astronauts’ lives in danger,” Whitman Cobb says. “I think this is probably the least risky option for NASA at this point.”

The shake-up in plans displays NASA’s high level of confidence in the SpaceX Dragon vehicle. In addition to relying on Musk’s company for access to the ISS, NASA has entrusted SpaceX not only with launching a host of high-profile science missions but also with landing astronauts on the lunar surface—and even with building the vehicle that will eventually destroy the space station in orbit.

For Boeing, NASA’s decision is likely a painful one, both in terms of the company’s reputation and its balance sheet. “I’m sure this is a big blow to them,” Whitman Cobb says. “Their financial statements have already shown that they have taken a pretty substantial monetary hit; this is going to be another one.”

At the press conference, however, Nelson and other NASA officials emphasized that the agency and Boeing are both still committed to making Starliner a regular working visitor to the space station. All along, NASA has highlighted the importance of having two U.S.-built vehicles that are capable of reaching the orbiting laboratory just in case an issue with one spaceship leaves it temporarily grounded. When asked how confident he was that Starliner would fly a crew again, Nelson said, “100 percent.”

No Boeing representatives attended NASA’s news conference on Saturday, but the company issued a statement that read, “We continue to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft. We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”

NASA is accustomed to weighing the lives of its astronauts in its decision-making, and officials regularly talk about the ways the disasters of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia shuttle in 2003 have shaped the agency’s “safety culture.” At the news conference on Saturday, Nelson referenced the lost shuttle crews and the way those incidents have changed NASA’s culture. But both shuttles were operated fully by the agency, and some experts have long wondered whether the dawn of commercial missions would muddy the waters when it came to safety standards in space.

The Path to Earth

As things stand now, Starliner will fly home empty in the coming weeks while Wilmore and Williams remain in orbit for another six months—a dramatic change in their work schedule. The duo will prepare the Boeing vehicle for departure and then bid farewell to it in early September. The empty capsule will sail through Earth’s atmosphere for a planned touchdown in the Utah desert. (Crew-8, the Dragon vehicle that is currently docked to the space station, will be temporarily reconfigured to hold six people just in case an emergency requires astronauts to evacuate, NASA officials said.)

Then, about a month from now, SpaceX will launch its planned Crew-9 mission, which will carry only two of the four crew members who were previously assigned: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague, and Stephanie Wilson and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. NASA has not yet determined who will remain on the flight, according to Norman Knight, director of flight operations.

Wilmore, Williams and their two new companions will remain in orbit for a standard six-month stint and will conduct various science experiments before they head for Earth in early 2025. (NASA has also confirmed that Wilmore and Williams were trained to perform space walks during an extended stay.)

A Decade of Bumps

The empty Starliner return represents another challenge for Boeing in a decade-long series of them. In 2014 NASA selected both Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles that would be capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS. The agency had retired its fleet of shuttles in 2011, just a decade into the station’s continuous occupation, and it found itself in the uncomfortable position of relying on Russia for transportation to and from the ISS.

The contracts with these private operators were meant to see astronauts launching by 2017—a time line neither company was able to meet. SpaceX built on its previous success in using Dragon capsules to run resupply missions to the orbital outpost, and it successfully and smoothly carried out a crewed test mission in 2020. Since then SpaceX has completed seven standard crew missions for NASA. Its eighth such mission is in orbit now and will return next month.

Boeing, meanwhile, was starting from scratch in building its Starliner vehicle, an endeavor that has taken a rocky road in the intervening decade. The company was finally ready to launch its uncrewed test flight in December 2019. But the spacecraft—the same capsule now in orbit—burned too much fuel in the minutes after launch, leaving it unable to reach the ISS.

After the incident, Starliner spent two and a half years grounded (in part because of a dozen faulty valves) before it executed a successful uncrewed test flight in May 2022. But that mission wasn’t flawless either, with thruster issues marring the ride to the space station. Last summer, Boeing lost another year due to a combination of parachute issues and the discovery that a highly flammable type of tape had been used throughout the capsule.

In early May, Starliner was headed to the launch pad to execute the vital crewed flight test—the final milestone standing between Boeing and regular trips to the International Space Station. But the mission team scrubbed the launch due to valve problems that necessitated a monthlong pause before another attempt, which was called off less than four minutes before flight due to a helium leak in the propulsion system.

So it was for the second time in less than a week that Wilmore and Williams climbed aboard Starliner, more than 100 feet above the launch pad, on June 5, expecting a mere weeklong jaunt to the space station—the third career visit for each astronaut. But during the journey to orbit the propulsion system sprang two more helium leaks, five of the vehicle’s thrusters failed, and the capsule’s cooling system was guzzling too much water.

None of the issues was particularly concerning on its own, but the combination made a big impression. Within just a few days of Wilmore and Williams’ arrival in orbit, NASA began delaying their return flight. By mid-June, agency personnel were discussing keeping the two in orbit while engineers gathered as much data as possible on parts of the vehicle that burn up during re-entry—not out of any concern for the vehicle’s safety, but merely to better understand future missions.

Returning to Flight

Still to be determined is Starliner’s path back to making flights. Though Boeing representatives weren’t included in Saturday’s press conference, Nelson said he had spoken earlier in the day with Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took office just over two weeks ago. “He expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely,” Nelson said.

However, questions remain. NASA officials declined to specify whether they would be willing to certify Starliner for regular crewed missions without it bringing Wilmore and Williams home, or whether they would consider assigning a full four-astronaut contingent to the next crewed flight. It’s also not clear what NASA’s international partners on the space station, particularly Russia, will need to see before trusting their own astronauts to a new vehicle.

All these considerations will become clearer in a few weeks, when Starliner is back on Earth and in the hands of NASA, and when Boeing engineers to evaluate the path forward. Whitman Cobb says the key factor in the vehicle’s future will be whether either organization requires changes be made to Starliner. “Any time you have to go in and change something on the capsule, on the system,” she says, “that’s probably going to take a lot longer.”