The Boeing Starliner crew may be stuck on the ISS until February 2025, and a SpaceX ship will return them to Earth.

NASA has confirmed that it is highly likely that the Boeing Starliner crew will be delayed on the ISS until February 2025 so that they can return to Earth on SpaceX’s Dragon Crew-9. A decision on this will be made by August 15, if Boeing engineers do not convince NASA specialists of the safe return of people to Earth in the company’s problematic ship.

Image source: NASA

Yesterday evening, a NASA press conference was held with a story about the current state of affairs with the problems of the Boeing ship. The agency confirmed that it has been quietly consulting with SpaceX for weeks about the possibility of returning astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – the crew of the ill-fated Starliner – to Earth on one of the Dragons.

If such a decision is made, then two astronauts will fly to the ISS as part of the Dragon Crew-9 mission instead of four. The two empty seats will be reserved for Butch and Williams. Spacesuits for flying on the Dragon have already been selected for them. However, with this development of events, both crew members of the Boeing ship will have to remain at the station until February 2025, when the Dragon Crew-9 ship is scheduled to return to Earth. Since they will be using supplies for the regular ISS crew, it makes sense to send another shift of two, rather than four, into orbit.

The latest meeting at NASA on the issue of returning people on a Boeing ship ended in disagreements between agency engineers and Boeing. The company insists that the problem with the ship’s maneuvering engines is known and almost thoroughly studied. It will not be able to prevent the ship from undocking from the station and ensuring the ship’s safe descent to Earth. However, NASA believes that there is no complete confidence in the safe descent of the ship, since there are still blank spots in the physics of the malfunction.

Ground tests of Starliner shunting engines showed that in the oxidizer supply system (dianitrogen tetroxide), one of the Teflon seals swells due to heating, which blocks the supply of the reagent to the fuel. Why this happens is not entirely clear. However, this led to the fact that when approaching the ISS, 5 of the ship’s 28 maneuvering engines were turned off by the on-board computer due to overheating. Later, four engines started, but one remained inoperative. This worries NASA engineers, but doesn’t worry Boeing engineers. The latter have a week to reassure agency specialists and return Starliner to Earth with people, and not empty.

NASA also officially confirmed that the return of the ship without a crew in automatic mode will require replacing the software. The last time the autopilot software was used was in 2022, when Starliner flew unmanned to the ISS. Since then, the programs have never been used or modified. In fact, Boeing will have to roll back two years. Uploading old software will require new testing and certification of its operation, which will take at least four weeks. That is why the launch of the Dragon Crew-9 mission was postponed from August 18 to the end of September. Since this was announced, it seems that NASA has already made an unspoken decision to return Starliner without people.