NASA, Boeing Modify Starliner Contract: Fewer Launches, Cargo Only on Starliner-1

NASA and Boeing have agreed to modify the contract for the Starliner commercial crew vehicle designed to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Repeated setbacks in Starliner’s development, including last year’s Crew Flight Test that left two NASA astronauts on the ISS for over nine months instead of eight days, already have cost Boeing more than $2 billion under the fixed-price contract. Now Starliner will launch four instead of six times for NASA, the first of which will carry only cargo.

The future of Starliner has been a matter of much speculation as delays pushed the spacecraft’s availability further into the future at the same time the ISS is nearing retirement. NASA’s current plan is to deorbit the ISS in 2030 with the final crew departing well before that. NASA launches crews to the ISS twice a year and time is running out for Starliner to get into the queue. The idea was for Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to alternate missions, but Crew Dragon has been the only option since commercial crew flights began in 2020.

The original Boeing contract called for six operational crewed launches to the ISS. NASA said today they “mutually agreed to modify the contract” reducing the “definitive order” to four, with the other two as options.

In addition, the first of those, Starliner-1, will be another test flight carrying only cargo not astronauts. The mission will test changes to the propulsion system following anomalies experienced on last year’s Crew Flight Test.

The uncrewed Starliner-1 test flight is targeted for April 2026.  If Starliner passes NASA certification, the other flights will follow. The timeline for those launches was not addressed today.

NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich explained the contract modification “allows NASA and Boeing to focus on safely certifying the system in 2026, execute Starliner’s first crew rotation when ready, and align our ongoing flight planning for future Starliner missions based on station’s operational needs through 2030.”

Boeing and SpaceX won fixed price contracts in 2014 to build space transportation systems to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS after the space shuttle program was terminated in 2011. Boeing got $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion. NASA wanted two systems for “dissimilar redundancy” as a hedge against one of them encountering delays or being grounded.

Both took longer to develop than planned, but SpaceX’s Crew Dragon made a crewed test flight to ISS with Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in 2020 and has successfully launched eighteen times since: 11 for NASA and seven private astronaut missions — four for Axiom Space, two for Jared Isaacman (Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn), and one for Chinese-born businessman Chun Wang (Fram2).

By contrast, Starliner has flown just three test flights.  The first uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) in December 2019 uncovered serious defects. Boeing decided to refly the uncrewed test before putting people on board. It was two-and-a-half years before that second flight, OFT-2, successfully took place in May 2022. Boeing and NASA were optimistic they could fly the next mission, the Crew Flight Test, in early 2023, but more issues emerged. In July 2023 the launch was indefinitely delayed when Boeing discovered tape wrapped around wiring harnesses inside the spacecraft was flammable and soft link fabric sections of the parachutes were insufficiently strong. They were finally ready to go on May 6, 2024, but the launch was scrubbed about 2 hours before liftoff due to a faulty valve in the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage. The rocket had to be returned to ULA’s Vertical Assembly Facility to replace the valve. While there, Boeing detected two issues with the Starliner spacecraft itself — a helium leak in one of Starliner’s Reaction Control System thrusters and a “design vulnerability” in ensuring there are three redundant methods for returning Starliner to Earth.

The Crew Flight Test finally lifted off on June 5, 2024 with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, but propulsion system problems emerged while docking to the ISS.  Butch and Suni had expected to stay on the ISS for about eight days, but after weeks of analysis NASA concluded Starliner wasn’t safe enough to bring them back to Earth. It returned empty to its landing site in White Sands, NM at 12:01 am EDT on September 7, 2024. Butch and Suni remained aboard the ISS as part of the next regular crew rotation, Crew-9, returning with them in March 2025 after 286 days in space. Both were very experienced astronauts who had previously been members of long-duration space station crews and seamlessly adjusted to their new roles.

NASA told SpacePolicyOnline.com today that “Boeing’s current contract value is $3.732 billion with a total potential value of $4.456 billion.”  As of February 2025, Boeing reported about $2 billion in losses due to Starliner since it must absorb the cost overruns.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment by press time.