Could this be the end of Starliner?

Bye Bye Baby

NASA seems to be saying “Sayonara” to Boeing’s accursed Starliner — at least for the foreseeable future.

As SpaceNews reports, an agency official demurred when asked about a mission update from earlier this week that appeared to put the leaky craft on ice after its disastrous first rollout left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station.

Earlier this week, NASA announced that its upcoming crew rotation missions dubbed Crew-10 and Crew-11 to the ISS will make use of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which was developed under the same Commercial Crew program as Boeing’s plagued Starliner. As SpaceNews points out, the former mission was initially meant to involve Starliner, which has yet to be certified for flight.

Whether that means the space agency has given up on Starliner for good remains unclear at best, but it’s certainly not a vote of confidence in the aerospace giant’s spacecraft.

In its announcement, NASA said that “the timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established.”

During a press conference the following day at the annual International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy seemed to reiterate that sentiment — and then some.

“It’s under data review,” Melroy told SpaceNews. “We need to have a decision: do we need another test flight?”

That does appear to be the elephant in the room since NASA brought the malfunctioning Boeing craft back down to Earth last month sans its precious cargo — even as the agency deals with getting those two humans home.

Homeward Bound

In its statement, NASA re-emphasized that Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are slated to come back to Earth in February on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that docked (successfully, we might add) with the ISS in late September.

After the Boeing craft crapped out in a number of ways, NASA has been playing a space age game of musical chairs, trying to find a way to bring the Starliner astronauts home.

NASA has had to make some tough calls — including leaving behind two disgruntled women who were supposed to hitch a ride on the same Crew-9 mission that’s going to bring Wilmore and Williams back.

As far as worst-case scenarios go, Boeing’s accursed Starliner could obviously have gone worse. Sort of going the route of the Challenger explosion, however, this is a pretty screwed-up debacle that has caused some massive headaches and embarrassment on all sides.

Worse yet, as SpaceNews reports, NASA administrator Bill Nelson admitted this week that the agency may have to continue relying on Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft in the years to come, an awkward confession given the sheer amount of resources it has poured into its Commercial Crew program.

More on the ISS: NASA Says It’s Totally Fine the Space Station is Absolutely Riddled With Cracks and Leaks