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NASA will help fund Starliner's thruster fix to keep a second crew vehicle alive
SpaceX will not commit to flying Crew Dragon much beyond 2030, and its president says Boeing should fly its own capsule. NASA is responding by paying to make Starliner flightworthy on a rocket it does not yet have.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Sources told Ars Technica that NASA will announce as early as next week that it is ordering two more crewed Starliner missions, paying part of the thruster fix, and supporting certification of the capsule on a new rocket.
- SpaceX told NASA officials in recent months that it intends to retire Crew Dragon by 2030 or sooner, and Crew Dragon is the only operational spacecraft NASA has for routine crew flights to low Earth orbit.
- Starliner still has to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, whose launch target remains under review, before certification would clear it for five crewed flights.
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Why it matters
- constraint Starliner-1 plus five crewed flights uses up the entire Atlas V inventory, so the two newly ordered missions cannot fly until a second launcher is certified for the capsule.
- cost The customer is now funding part of the repair on a spacecraft it already paid to develop, which moves thruster remediation cost off Boeing's books and onto NASA's.
- decision Companies building commercial stations have to plan crew transport against a capsule that has flown people once, badly, and a rocket certification that has not started publicly.
- exposure No contract covers crew flights after 2030. NASA's plans for those years rest on a supplier statement its president declined to extend on the record.
Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore launched on Starliner in June 2024 for what was meant to be eight days at the space station [1]. Helium leaks and thruster malfunctions sent the capsule home empty, and the two astronauts came back nine months later aboard a Crew Dragon [2]. SpaceX told NASA officials in recent months that it intends to retire Crew Dragon by 2030, if not before [3].
United Launch Alliance will retire Atlas V after flying the six vehicles left in its inventory, and all six are assigned to Starliner missions [6]. Certification runs through the uncrewed Starliner-1 flight, and success there would clear five crewed flights, according to Ars Technica [7]. One plus five is six. In February, NASA said teams had made "great progress" on the technical issues and hoped to fly the uncrewed mission in April; it did not fly, and the target remains "under review" [17][7].
So the two extra crewed missions NASA is about to order have no rocket in inventory to fly on. The announcement therefore includes support for certifying Starliner on a different launcher [8][5]. NASA is also covering part of the thruster repair on a vehicle it paid to develop [5]. Boeing's losses on the Starliner program topped $2 billion in 2025 [9], and NASA has spent significantly more on developing and certifying Starliner than on Crew Dragon, which has completed all 13 of its crewed ISS missions [10][11].
The money going the other way is firmer. NASA's $946 million award to SpaceX buys three more crewed ISS missions and extends performance through 2030 [12]. The three missions work out at about $315 million a flight [13]. The value of the two-mission Starliner order has not been reported. Gizmodo reported there is no reason to believe the modification changed SpaceX's plans to retire Crew Dragon, only that the retirement will not happen before 2030 [14].
Asked on the All-In Podcast whether SpaceX would keep flying the vehicle for some time, President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell would not commit. "We're not retiring it today, for sure," she said [15][22]. She then turned to the other supplier: "Boeing has been paid, I think, probably more than we have been paid to develop their human capsule. So we're just gonna let them have some business. They should fly their capsule. The government paid a lot of money for that," Shotwell said [16].
SpaceX's reason for winding Dragon down is Starship, which it wants for Starlink and a new megaconstellation aimed at orbital data centers [19]. NASA cannot wait that out. The ISS is slated for retirement around 2030, several companies are building replacements, and the agency has to convince those partners their astronauts will have a dependable ride [18].
Teams count a second vendor as a hedge the moment it appears on a slide. Count the flights the backup can fly on hardware and approvals that exist today, then count the ones waiting on an approval you are helping to pay for. Starliner's count is six flights on rockets already built and two that depend on a rocket certification NASA has not yet announced [6][8][5].
What to watch
- Whether next week's NASA announcement names the replacement rocket for Starliner and the value of the two-mission order.
- A firm launch date for the uncrewed Starliner-1 flight replacing the current under-review target.
- Any SpaceX move to retire Crew Dragon before 2030 or to extend it past the new contract's period of performance.