On June 5, 2024, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore donned bulky blue spacesuits and clambered aboard Boeing’s Starliner space vehicle. Later that morning, the spacecraft launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral to begin its long-delayed first crewed mission to the International Space Station. Anyone who follows space news knows what happened next: Starliner suffered a series of malfunctions and was eventually declared unsafe to carry the two test-pilot astronauts back to Earth. Williams’s and Wilmore’s planned eight-day visit to the station turned into nine months. Finally, on Monday, March 17, the two astronauts climbed into sleek, white spacesuits designed by SpaceX and strapped themselves into seats in a SpaceX Dragon capsule attached to one of the station’s docking ports.
Now Williams and Wilmore are home. But the saga of their long ISS sojourn, including the debacle of Boeing’s effort to build a commercial space vehicle, will remain an enduring part of space lore. The episode marks a major setback to NASA’s long-term goal of helping private companies, including Boeing, develop and fly their own space vehicles. That program, known as Commercial Crew, allows NASA to avoid the expense of building and launching its own spacecraft and instead to fly its astronauts aboard privately owned rockets and crew vehicles. When that program launched 15 years ago, NASA leaders expected Boeing to be its lead vendor in commercial space operations. Instead, Elon Musk’s SpaceX—then considered a rookie startup in the space business—quickly became the agency’s indispensable partner in delivering crews and cargo to the space station.
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The Starliner mission was intended to prove that the Boeing vehicle was ready for routine crewed spaceflights. That would give NASA a choice of vendors when planning missions and give SpaceX its first commercial competition in the human spaceflight business. But after Starliner’s glitchy performance, that goal appears dubious. Indeed, industry insiders question whether Boeing—America’s most storied aerospace manufacturer—will continue to play a major role in the country’s space efforts. (Boeing did not respond to a request for comment.) Starliner eventually flew home, without its crew, landing safely in New Mexico. But that uneventful flight did little to quell doubts about the spacecraft’s (or Boeing’s) future.
The spacesuits Williams and Wilmore wore on their outbound and return flights tell part of the story. Despite being a newcomer to human spaceflight, SpaceX was able to develop its form-fitting white pressure suits relatively rapidly. Both NASA and private SpaceX astronauts have been wearing them during missions aboard the company’s Dragon capsule since 2020. (If the suits look like something out of a sci-fi movie, that is no accident; the company consulted with Hollywood costume designer Jose Fernandez, who created suits for the silver-screen versions of characters like Wonder Woman and Wolverine.) The ability to design, test, and deploy new technologies quickly is a key factor setting SpaceX apart from legacy aerospace companies.
The suits Boeing designed for Starliner missions took much longer to develop. NASA tested them in an earthbound crew module in 2022, but they weren’t worn in flight until Williams’s and Wilmore’s bumpy Starliner test flight last year. While technologically sophisticated, the suits recall the bulky look of the “pumpkin” pressure suits worn by space shuttle astronauts. (The Boeing suits are not compatible with the Dragon capsule. That meant Williams and Wilmore would have to wait for properly fitted SpaceX suits to be delivered before they could even consider a return on the SpaceX ship.) Boeing’s halting pace designing its spacesuit was more than matched by the company’s tortured progress building the Starliner vehicle itself.
Boeing and SpaceX both started developing their respective crew vehicles around the same time. In 2014, both companies received NASA grants—$2.6 billion for SpaceX; $4.2 billion for Boeing—to complete their spacecraft. But while SpaceX raced ahead, Boeing struggled. Starliner’s first uncrewed test flight suffered disastrous software problems, and its second revealed worrisome hardware glitches. The company has announced $1.6 billion in losses on its Starliner program. That’s a particularly bitter pill given that the troubled spacecraft might never fly again, meaning Boeing would also miss out on expected future revenues. Meanwhile, SpaceX has launched a total of 14 crewed missions to the space station.
Williams and Wilmore are coming back to Earth in a very different political environment than the one they left when they launched last year. In its first two months in office, the Trump administration has brought sweeping changes to the U.S. government. Many space watchers expect NASA to undergo a major transformation, especially given Elon Musk’s deep involvement in setting the White House agenda. Many potential NASA reforms are long overdue, as I outlined in a City Journal article last month.
One key question is how NASA can move forward with its cost-saving commercial programs given the Starliner setback. Boeing has already said it won’t participate in future projects that employ the strict fixed-price budgeting rules NASA requires for commercial vendors. Fortunately, NASA’s public-private partnership with SpaceX has been a stunning success, and other vendors, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are making progress. A bigger issue is what to do with NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). That bloated, Apollo-style rocket was built the old-fashioned way, with lavish, open-ended contracts, and is owned and flown by NASA itself. It is currently scheduled to carry U.S. astronauts to the Moon in 2027. But the project’s delays and cost-overruns are legendary, and many space experts advise simply killing the program. That move would be another blow to Boeing, which is one of the lead contractors on the project.
For the moment, spaceflight advocates—not to mention NASA insiders—are on tenterhooks waiting to learn which programs the White House will target. For example, the Mars Society, an outside space advocacy group, recently expressed outrage over reported plans to enact a 50 percent cut in NASA’s budget for unmanned science missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars Curiosity Rover. The group described the potential cuts as a “brutal attempt to wreck American space science.”
During Williams and Wilmore’s long stay at the ISS, space watchers got a taste of the politically charged way President Trump and his advisor Musk approach space issues. “The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded at the @Space_Station as soon as possible,” Musk tweeted on his X platform in late January. “We will do so. Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.” President Trump later confirmed on his own social media platform that he had asked Musk “to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration . . . . Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck Elon!!!”
The exchange suggested that SpaceX was about to launch a daring emergency mission to rescue Williams and Wilmore from their sad abandonment in space. In fact, NASA’s plan for bringing the astronauts home had been in place for months. Why did the return take so long? The ISS always has at least one SpaceX Dragon capsule attached to serve as a lifeboat in case of an emergency. NASA could have opted to use that capsule to bring back the astronauts, but first it would need to launch another Dragon to take over that lifeboat function. So, instead of adding an expensive, additional launch to its schedule, NASA decided to integrate Williams and Wilmore into the regular ISS crew and then fly them home as part of a scheduled crew rotation. That required altering the station’s crew rotation plan a bit: a new four-member team—Crew-9—was slated to arrive at the ISS in September; NASA bumped two astronauts from that team in order to allow Williams and Wilmore to fill those positions and take those two seats on the return flight. That meant that the two Starliner astronauts would stay aboard the ISS for the full six-month duration of the Crew-9 mission and then fly home with their new teammates.
It all sounds complicated, but making Williams and Wilmore part of the ISS crew was the simplest, least expensive solution. As highly experienced astronauts, they were able to make real contributions to the ISS mission, including taking part in a spacewalk. The unexpected failure of Starliner kept the two astronauts living aboard the station much longer than expected, but they weren’t “abandoned” and didn’t require a rescue mission. On Facebook, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg noted that “the decision to bring them home on a SpaceX vehicle was made LAST SUMMER. And nothing has changed since.” The president might not know this, but Musk certainly should.
To outsiders, the idea of spending nine months in space sounds like a terrible hardship. That’s not how astronauts see it. Astronauts spend their entire careers training—and hoping—for an opportunity to fly. Many never get the chance. Others are lucky to get to space once or twice. So, while the extended absence from their families was likely bittersweet, Williams and Wilmore seem to have embraced their ISS experience. (Williams now has the distinction of having spent more hours conducting spacewalks than any other female astronaut in history.) As Nyberg explained, “As a former astronaut, the only astronauts I feel bad for are the two who had to be removed from Crew-9 to accommodate Butch and Suni’s return and now have to wait for their chance to live and work on the ISS!”
Williams and Wilmore are now back with their families. But, with major decisions about the future of NASA looming, the political drama surrounding the American space program is likely just beginning.
Top Photo: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams (Photo by MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/AFP via Getty Images)
