Boeing’s Starliner capsule has finally returned to Earth, but plenty of questions linger about the program’s future. The capsule landed safely at a NASA facility in New Mexico just after midnight Saturday, sans its two crew members who remain on the International Space Station and will hitch a ride back to Earth on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program director Steve Stich said during a post-landing press conference that as it turns out, “it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board” had they taken Starliner back. That still might not guarantee Boeing’s future in space, however, as the beleaguered company takes a beat to re-evaluate its troubled capsule program. Boeing has said little on the future of Starliner beyond its announcement of the test flight’s return. Mark Nappi, VP and manager of the Commercial Crew Program, said Saturday the company will “review the data and determine the next steps for the program.” The Starliner debacle could touch off a reboot or even a rollback of Boeing’s space program, observers say. The aviation giant did not immediately respond to DFD request for comment. Boeing may “be considering whether it wants to divest some of its business units,” Todd Harrison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies space, told DFD. He speculated that a future is possible where Starliner continues but under different ownership, although he said it was too early to determine Boeing’s role in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program going forward. A NASA spokesperson told Ars Technica last week that the agency has yet to commit to any additional Starliner missions beyond three that have already been ordered. The agency still must decide whether it will certify the Starliner capsule for official missions, after the unmanned return of the test flight. NASA did not immediately reply to a request for comment. How Boeing decides next to approach space could have repercussions beyond just NASA’s ability to ferry astronauts back and forth from the ISS. The company is the most prominent of many collaborators on NASA’s Space Launch System, which will rocket astronauts back to the moon by 2026 as part of the agency’s planned Artemis missions. Some longtime space observers now argue that program might be endangered, as Boeing’s woes mount. “This loss in confidence helps put the entire Artemis program into a new state of uncertainty,” Clive Irving, a veteran space journalist, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times in August. He pointed to a report published last month by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, on the Artemis IV project scheduled for 2028. The authors write that quality control issues there are “largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing.” “There is the fear things may only get worse,” Irving added. Massive corporations like Boeing and prestige-conveying, crown-jewel federal agencies like NASA are always planning over the next horizon (no pun intended). But AEI’s Harrison suggested that Boeing’s next steps are likely more prosaic when it comes to getting its space program back on track — delving into how and why the Starliner went awry, before deciding how to manage this massive engineering responsibility that’s morphed into yet another unwanted PR nightmare. “Once Boeing knows that, it can reassess how long it will take until it can repeat this test flight and how much it will cost,” Harrison said. “At that point, management at Boeing can make a more informed decision about whether or not to continue with the program.”
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