Boeing still working with NASA to schedule next Starliner flight

WASHINGTON — Boeing is still working with NASA to determine when to fly its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle on a cargo mission to the International Space Station. In an earnings call July 28 to discuss the company’s second-quarter financial results, Kelly Ortberg, president and chief executive of Boeing, described Starliner as the last of a set of fixed-price contracts in the company’s defense and space unit that the company is working to get on track after cost overruns. “The one program we have work yet to do with the customer on is commercial crew, or the Starliner program,” he said after discussing work on several military aircraft and drone programs. Starliner has not flown since the Crew Flight Test mission two years ago, which suffered thruster malfunctions and helium leaks. NASA elected to bring the spacecraft back uncrewed, with the two NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station on that spacecraft remaining in space for nine months before returning on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Boeing has been working to resolve those problems but has provided few major updates on those efforts. “The redesign of the Starliner deficiencies is going quite well. We’re feeling pretty good about that,” Ortberg said during the call. However, at a June 22 meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, committee members said work to address those problems was still ongoing. They stated that it could take up to a year for the vehicle to fly again on Starliner-1, a cargo-only mission that will effectively be another test flight of the spacecraft. Ortberg suggested it was primarily a matter of scheduling the mission with NASA. “As NASA’s replanning their launch sequence, that’ll have some impact to when we’re actually doing the launch,” he said. “We’ve got to work with NASA to align on when the launches are going to be, both the crewed and uncrewed launches, going forward.” At a briefing in May, a NASA official said launch opportunities for Starliner-1 remained under review after the mission was not included in a schedule of cargo and crew missions to the ISS planned through late this year. “Our schedule is pretty busy, but we’re trying to maintain windows where we can go fly that,” said Bill Spetch, NASA ISS operations and integration manager. Boeing added more details in a July 28 Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-Q filing about its financial results. “We had expected to launch an uncrewed mission followed by a crewed mission during 2026. Based on recent discussions with NASA, we now expect to complete an uncrewed mission no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026,” the company stated. “We and NASA are currently in discussions regarding timing and requirements for follow-on missions, and the outcome of those discussions is uncertain,” the company added. “Mission schedule and requirements for future missions remain critical assumptions and will be informed by the ongoing discussions with NASA.” In the earnings call, Ortberg s…