Sept 18 (Reuters) – NASA is in talks with Boeing about using the aerospace manufacturer’s Starliner vehicle to handle new missions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The discussion pertains to Starliner handling 10 or more new flights in the years ahead, the report said, citing sources familiar with the matter.
“We’re committed to NASA’s commercial crew efforts and look forward to launching the next Starliner mission according to NASA’s mission requirements,” a Boeing spokesperson told Reuters. NASA did not respond to the request.
The talks suggest NASA remains committed to maintaining Boeing as a second US crew transportation provider alongside SpaceX, despite Starliner’s troubled crewed test mission two years ago.
NASA chose Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to the space station, to give the US a regular domestic launch capability after NASA retired the space shuttle, ending years of reliance on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.
“NASA is developing plans to meet our nation’s objectives for a sustained presence in low Earth orbit” and expects to release details soon, an agency spokesperson told WSJ.
Boeing’s Starliner faced problems on its 2024 crewed test flight, prompting NASA to return the capsule empty and bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on a SpaceX Dragon after a planned 10-day mission became a more than nine-month ISS stay.
Earlier in the day, NASA awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract to fly three additional astronaut missions to the International Space Station, extending the company’s crewed flights through 2030.
(Reporting by Aatreyee Dasgupta in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Arun Koyyur)
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