NASA targets December for uncrewed Starliner return-to-flight mission

NASA is targeting no earlier than December 2026 for an uncrewed Boeing Starliner flight to the International Space Station, administrator Jared Isaacman announced at a Sept 28 news conference. He was joined by Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, astronaut Woody Hoburg and John Mulholland, Boeing’s Commercial Crew program manager — the briefing lineup NASA confirmed ahead of the event.

It is the agency’s first detailed return-to-flight plan since the crew flight test, declared a Type A mishap.

The uncrewed flight — Starliner-1 — will not clear the vehicle for crew. Weigel said the service-module thruster valve poppet problem “cannot be fully fixed with the current hardware”: “we’re not able to address that with the current design,” making a poppet modification necessary on the crewed vehicle first. She said the helium-system seal material broke down after long oxidizer exposure — Boeing changed the material and selected seals at the larger end of tolerance — while crew-module thruster corrosion came from leftover hydrazine reacting with carbon dioxide in the air, countered with new flush-and-purge procedures.

Mulholland said Boeing will replace the valves on all 12 crew-module thrusters on each of its two spacecraft, work already underway. Starliner-2 will also get new batteries, redesigned parachute joints and a higher-frequency data recorder.

NASA named Hoburg — the SpaceX Crew-6 pilot — to command Starliner-2, planned for 2028. Boeing’s SEC filings target Q4 2026 NET for Starliner-1, while a NASA Office of Inspector General audit published June 30 says human-rating certification slips to 2027 at the earliest.