The space agency said the now uncrewed vehicle would make the six-hour journey autonomously, though controllers could intervene and control it remotely if necessary.
It comes after NASA conceded defeat last week and revealed Starliner’s ‘stranded’ crew would return to Earth with SpaceX in February – eight months after they blasted off for what was meant to be a one-week mission.
At an earlier briefing, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said there were “a few things that we have to do differently” because the vehicle was leaving without astronauts, including departing the vicinity of the station faster than planned.
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“We need to get the vehicle back. We need to work through our sequence of events on what changes we’ll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we’ll make a decision on the next flight,” Stich said.
Despite the bad publicity, NASA’s associate administrator, Jim Free, was upbeat about the mission’s success.
“We’ve accomplished a lot on this mission and learned a lot about this vehicle,” he said. “We’ll look at this as we do any of our missions to see if it falls into any of the categories we have that we define as a mishap once we get the vehicle back.”
After a series of delays, Starliner finally blasted off to the ISS in June on its historic first crewed mission. The spacecraft was due to come back after just a week, but issues with both the thrusters and helium leaks mean their stay will now extend to eight months.
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Previously, both Boeing and NASA have strongly denied any suggestion the pair would not return on Starliner, despite the potential to send it back home autonomously without crew.
Over the last two months, teams on Earth have been trying to duplicate the loss of performance in the thrusters, with researchers concluding that a Teflon seal had heated and expanded, which constrained the flow of oxidiser.
However, NASA concluded there was still “too much uncertainty” in predicting how the thruster would perform after undocking, and instead opted to send the spacecraft back without crew.
In a boost to Boeing though, Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, attempted to downplay criticism of the aerospace giant by arguing spaceflight is risky “even at its routine” and a test flight “by nature is neither safe nor routine”.
“So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the ISS and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety,” he said. “Safety is our North Star of what we are trying to do in a very hostile environment, in which if you make a mistake, it’s very unforgiving.”
The current Starliner mission is the final test flight before NASA certifies the vehicle for regular operational missions.
Starliner was initially due to blast off to the ISS in early May, but the first attempt was scrubbed at the last minute because of a faulty valve on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
A subsequent try was also repeatedly delayed, this time due to a helium issue. Finally, a third problem was found to be linked to a flange in a thruster in the spacecraft’s service module.
May’s scrubbed launches are the latest in years of issues for Starliner, which Boeing hopes will be able to regularly send US astronauts into space much like SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Starliner’s first attempt at a flight without humans onboard failed in 2019 due to software glitches, but it eventually docked with the ISS in May 2022.
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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