Absurdity
Boeing Offers Astronauts A 2028 Boarding Date To Make Up For 2024
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
HOUSTON, TX: Boeing announced this week that its CST-100 Starliner capsule is targeting an uncrewed test flight as early as January, with the first paying astronaut mission to follow no sooner than 2028, a schedule that company officials described as both realistic and exciting, apparently without anyone in the room suggesting those two words do not currently apply to the same sentence.
The announcement is Boeing's formal re-entry into the commercial crew market, which is a way of saying the company has decided that what happened last time was, on balance, not disqualifying.
What happened last time: Starliner launched NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in June 2024 on what was billed as a short-duration test flight. The capsule then developed enough helium leaks and thruster failures that NASA declined to put the two astronauts back inside it. Wilmore and Williams spent nine months on the station before returning home on a SpaceX vehicle. Boeing's capsule came back empty. The company has described this outcome as a learning experience, which is technically accurate in the same way that a kitchen fire is a learning experience about grease.
Boeing Commercial Crew program manager Mark Nappi told reporters the team has made significant progress on the anomalies identified during the 2024 mission, adding that confidence is high and the path forward is clear. He did not specify which path, since the last clear path produced a capsule that NASA would not let two people ride in for the return leg of a trip they had already completed in it going the other direction.
The January uncrewed flight, designated Starliner-1, will carry no humans, which is either a safety precaution or a contractual acknowledgment that no one has agreed to go yet. A Boeing spokesperson confirmed the flight plan calls for the capsule to launch, dock, undock, and return on its own, the same basic sequence Starliner has now attempted several times with a range of outcomes that the company prefers to call a data set.
NASA, for its part, issued a statement saying it remains committed to two commercial crew providers and looks forward to Starliner's continued development, which is the institutional equivalent of telling a contractor you still believe in them after they left a load-bearing wall in your garage.
If the January flight goes well, Boeing expects a crewed mission in 2028. This means the company's current ask is that astronauts board a vehicle whose last occupied flight required a rescue, wait approximately four years for a follow-up attempt, and then get in.
Sources familiar with the program noted that SpaceX's Dragon, which has completed seventeen crewed missions without leaving anyone on the station indefinitely, will continue flying in the interim. Boeing did not comment on whether it considers this a competitive pressure or simply a coincidence.
Wilmore and Williams have both said they bear no ill will toward the Starliner program. Neither has volunteered to fly it in 2028.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/29/boeings-calamity-capsule-gets-another-shot-at-the-iss-taxi-business/5299778