After more than two months of testing and deliberation, NASA has decided that astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will return home aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon in February 2025, and that the Boeing Starliner they flew to the International Space Station in June will return without a crew. At a press conference on Saturday, Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said there is “a lot of uncertainty” surrounding projections of Starliner’s thrusters moving forward with a crewed return flight.
“The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home unmanned is a safety commitment,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The plan now is for the first Starliner crew to return with SpaceX’s Crew-9, which is scheduled to launch to the ISS in late September. It was originally supposed to carry four crew members, but will instead have to go with two to make room for Wilmore and Williams. This spacecraft is being reconfigured with seats for two astronauts, and Dragon spacesuits will be added to its payload for them to wear at home.
The duo will be on the space station for about eight months before Wilmore and Williams depart. The Starliner flight test was only supposed to last a little over a week.
According to Stich, the next step is to prepare the Starliner for release and complete it as an unmanned flight test. The agency plans to conduct the second phase of the process this coming week, but expects the demolition to take place early next month. “We are changing the sequence of allocations we planned and will consider these aspects in the readiness review,” Stich said. “We’re going to go with a simplified decoupling technique to get away from the station a little faster.”
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