Astronauts have not flown aboard Boeing’s Starliner since the 2024 test mission that left two of them on the International Space Station for far longer than planned, and the next crewed flight is now a 2028 target. NASA and Boeing laid out the schedule on September 28, 2026, in a joint update on the program’s development plans. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has said the agency wants this vehicle to return to flight.
The 2028 date belongs to the second Starliner mission, which will carry a crew. A shorter, uncrewed flight comes first.
Starliner-2 and the 2028 crew target
The NASA and Boeing release lists Starliner-2, the crewed mission, with a target return by 2028. The wording is a target, and the release carries no firm launch date. SpacePolicyOnline reports that Boeing is aiming at mid-2028 and that astronaut Woody Hoburg will command the mission. Houston Public Media, in a report from the same week, also names Hoburg as commander and says additional crew members from international partners may be added. NASA’s Dana Weigel, the Low Earth Orbit Program Manager, said in the release that Starliner’s next flight is a critical step on the path to full system certification. The crewed flight depends on that step going well, and the release lists what has to change first: thermal modifications to the service module, an additional thruster valve design modification, new crew module thrusters and batteries, and modifications to the parachute system.
The 2024 flight test behind the delay
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on Starliner’s crew flight test in 2024 on what was planned as a mission of about a week. Thruster failures and helium leaks left NASA unwilling to bring them home on the capsule. Starliner landed empty in September 2024 after spending 93 days in orbit, and the pair returned to Earth in March 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission; Houston Public Media counts the astronauts’ stay at 286 days, against the eight planned.
NASA’s February 19, 2026 investigation report classified the event a Type A mishap, the agency’s highest level, and cited an interplay of combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps and cultural breakdowns. Isaacman said at the report’s release that the agency has to own its mistakes and ensure they never happen again, and Houston Public Media quotes him on the principle behind it: when NASA gets something wrong, it has to investigate how it occurred and be open and transparent about the findings. Military & Aerospace Electronics counts 61 recommendations arising from the investigation. The September release gives the technical finding in plain terms: the service module reaction control thrusters operated outside engineering qualification parameters, a result of a combination of factors including the thermal environment and features inherent in their design. SpacePolicyOnline quotes Weigel explaining that the thruster’s valve poppet extrudes under certain thermal and mechanical conditions and that design modifications will be implemented on the crewed vehicle.
Contract changes and the fifth and sixth flights
Isaacman said, in SpacePolicyOnline’s account, that NASA wants multiple crew transportation options and intends to see this vehicle return to flight. The agency is keeping the vehicle in its plans even after a mishap it ranked at the top of its own scale, and the reinstated fifth and sixth flights show how far that commitment extends beyond a single return mission. The release adds that NASA will work with Boeing and United Launch Alliance to certify the Vulcan rocket for crew transport once the Atlas V flies for the last time, so the schedule rests on a launch vehicle change as well as the capsule fixes.
The same release says NASA intends to exercise options for fifth and sixth Starliner flights to the space station. Boeing’s own account describes the contract modification as adding resources for human spaceflight certification, restoring those two flights, which had been optional, and establishing Starliner as a long-term provider of crewed missions to low Earth orbit.
Houston Public Media reported that the earlier version of the contract had been cut from $4.1 billion to $3.7 billion and from six flights to four, with Isaacman signaling a possible return to the six-flight plan. SpacePolicyOnline adds that Boeing has already absorbed $2 billion in cost overruns under its fixed-price contract. John Mulholland, Boeing’s vice president for the Starliner program, said that Boeing and NASA teammates worked together over the last two years to address the issues encountered, with safety first as their guide. Boeing says 19 of the 21 in-flight anomalies from the 2024 crew flight test are closed, with the remaining items expected to close in October.
Boeing’s statement about the last two years leaves one measurable item: the uncrewed flight that precedes Starliner-2, which NASA describes as an engineering evaluation to identify residual risk ahead of crewed missions.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
- The NSA says three phone features should be off whenever you aren’t using them
- Hawaii’s magnitude 6.0 Kona earthquake is now a federal major disaster
- Comcast is shutting down its email service, and Xfinity customers must act to keep it
- Invisible volcanic gas at a California ski resort has killed three ski patrollers
