Good afternoon, and welcome to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I'm George Alderman, NASA deputy press secretary. Today, NASA and Boeing will provide an update on the continued development of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and discuss the path ahead as we work toward regular crewed missions to and from the International Space Station. Joining us today are NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program, NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg, and John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for Boeing's Commercial Crew program. We'll begin with opening remarks from each of our participants, and then we'll take questions from the media here in the room. And joining us by phone for media, joining us on the phone, please press star one to enter the question queue. And with that, I'll turn it over to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
Thanks, George. So good afternoon everyone. We are certainly living in some of the most exciting times, I believe, in space exploration since the Apollo era. And as this domain continues to open up, there is going to be tremendous demand for launch vehicles, for transfer stages, for landers, and of course, spacecraft that can take crew to and from low Earth orbit. Now, around 15 years ago, after the space shuttle retired, the United States certainly went through a somewhat dark period where we depended on Russia for astronaut access to space. Now, the Commercial Crew program restored that capability to American soil and was designed from the beginning to give NASA multiple options for human spaceflight. Now, SpaceX Dragon capsule has been a great success. Perhaps the clearest proof of what the Commercial Crew program was designed to achieve, providing a reliable American transportation system that is supported government and commercial missions to low Earth orbit. Now, Starliner has always been meant to be part of that story. So of course, the program did encounter notable delays and significant technical issues, including the uncrewed demonstrations and the high-profile mishap during the crew flight test mission. And as I said earlier this year, we have taken responsibility for NASA's contributions to the program challenges, including our handling of the mishap investigative process at NASA. We took ownership of the matter and delivered extreme transparency and corrective actions, as outlined in the Pit report, and Boeing responded, as we would have expected from a long-standing agency partner. Mistakes and missteps in the business of sending astronauts to and from one of the most demanding and dangerous environments are always possibilities, despite how hard we work to minimize them. Alongside our partners, we endeavor to engineer safe vehicles, test and qualify hardware, train our operators and astronauts, mitigate the risk to the greatest extent possible. And then we fly. When we get something wrong, we have to investigate how it occurred and be open and transparent about the findings so we can learn from them, so we can fix the problems and again, move forward.
With respect to the Starliner program, the teams have made substantial progress in that regard. Corrective actions have been assigned across the Pit recommendations, with the work divided between what is required for an uncrewed Starliner One mission and what must be completed before it carries our astronauts once again on Starliner Two. Now, teams have identified the cause behind the service module helium leak experienced during Starliner's test flight, and replaced the affected seals with a new material and tighter tolerances in that area. They traced the crew module thruster anomaly to internal valve corrosion and put new controls in place to flush and purge those thrusters between mission operations. Boeing also made significant thermal modifications to the service module to reduce thruster temperatures, one of the major contributors to the performance issues we saw in flight. Those are meaningful and necessary improvements. But before crewed operations resume, the service module thruster poppet requires a design modification. New crew module thrusters will be installed, along with a few other spacecraft upgrades to batteries and the parachute system. NASA is targeting no earlier than December 2026 for an uncrewed Starliner One mission to the International Space Station to validate the recent remediation efforts. From there, we will gather data, continue implementing the remaining changes recommended in the Pit report, and plan for a crewed Starliner Two mission in 2028.
Today, it's my privilege to announce that NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg will command Starliner Two. Now, Woody served as a pilot of NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission, spent over 185 days aboard the International Space Station, completed two spacewalks. He's an absolutely brilliant guy who's helping on a lot of our ignition priorities, and I am confident his experience will serve this mission incredibly well. Starliner Two would begin a series of as many as five crewed Starliner missions under the current plan. Now, we also recognize the component service life limitations of the current Atlas V launch vehicles that have already been produced. And of course, the rocket is no longer in production. Therefore, NASA will begin working with Boeing and United Launch Alliance towards certifying the Vulcan Centaur rocket for Starliner, providing a sustained transportation solution to the International Space Station and then subsequent commercial destinations that may follow.
Now, of course, I'm sure many are interested in the future of Dragon alongside this announcement. I do not think it's a secret that SpaceX intends to sunset older platforms like Falcon and Dragon as they concentrate on their next-generation capability, Starship, which just had a significant milestone today as it reached orbit and is paramount to America's ability to return to the moon. Our ambitions on the lunar surface itself, including a moon base, and can also serve other potential missions from carrying grand new telescopes for science and discovery to national security applications to the orbital economy. I think it's safe to say that both Falcon and Dragon exceeded all their initial design expectations, and this transition provides industry with really a fantastic opportunity. So given our extensive history with Starliner and the taxpayer investment already made, we believe it represents the fastest path to preserving reliable crewed access to low Earth orbit. But from the beginning, commercial crew was built around competition, and NASA continues to see real value in having two crew transportation providers. Our forecasted demand is approximately one crewed mission to low Earth orbit every six months, and competition can help drive down costs, strengthen resilience, and support the broader commercial ecosystem. So while we acknowledge that cost volatility that may come from major suppliers entering and then exiting the market, NASA would like nothing more than to see additional crewed and cargo providers, a thriving commercial LEO destination, and overall orbital economy.
At the same time, we remain extremely focused on implementing President Trump's national space policy, returning NASA astronauts to the moon, building the moon base, getting America underway on nuclear power in space, launching more missions of science and discovery, rebuilding our X-Plane portfolio, and developing the technology required to take humanity farther than ever before. And Starliner has an important role to play in that future, supporting access for NASA alongside our international and commercial partners, the International Space Station, and again, the commercial ecosystem that may come next. I have every confidence that teams working the Starliner effort will adhere to the agency's high standards. NASA engineers are working hand in hand with our partners, supporting testing at White Sands, working the hardware, interrogating the data, and taking ownership of the outcomes. We expect them to deliver. That is why I want the Starliner story to become, and frankly, the story of every program underway at NASA: talented teams embedded with our commercial partners across Artemis, across Moon Base, and all of our world-changing missions, solving the hardest problems and putting wins on the board and delivering the inspiring headlines the world has been patiently waiting for. And now with that, I will hand things over to our low Earth orbit program manager, Dana Weigel. Dana, over to you.
Thank you. Thank you all for being here with us this afternoon. And I do want to thank the administrator for his leadership as we chart Starliner's path forward. We've partnered very closely with Boeing to outline Starliner's return to flight plan, and we're happy to share those details with you today. As the administrator mentioned, it's always been the commercial crew program's goal to have two crew transportation providers to ensure commercial access to low-Earth orbit. As you're all aware, and as SpaceX has publicly stated, the Dragon and the Falcon won't be around forever. Certifying Boeing's Starliner is important for both supporting ISS and also for follow-on future commercial destinations. We've taken deliberate action since the CFT mission to correct issues, to better understand system performance, and to implement upgrades. The Boeing and NASA teams have partnered together to both test and analyze all of the propulsion system anomalies, and we now understand the causes. Going into a little bit more detail on the helium system leakage, we now understand that the material that was selected had performance degradation and issues after long-term exposure to the NTO, the oxidizer. That is why the material, the seal, was changed. We also realized we needed to select seals that were on the larger side of the tolerance spectrum. Boeing has implemented all of those changes on the Starliner One spacecraft already, and we've got additional seals in long-duration exposure testing looking forward towards the crewed missions.
We determined that the crew module thruster anomaly is the result of corrosion. This is created by residual hydrazine propellant combined with atmospheric exposure, specifically the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And so Boeing has put in place procedures to flush out the hydrazine and also to flow a continuous purge to isolate those thrusters from the environment. Now we'll have to replace all of the thrusters on the crewed vehicle. So we start with new thrusters, and then we'll have all of these additional mitigations in place to keep them from corroding. Through extensive service module thruster testing, we now understand that the thruster's valve poppet extrudes under certain thermal and mechanical conditions. On the thermal side, Boeing has implemented thermal shunts and barriers to the spacecraft. We expect that to substantially reduce the temperature that the thruster will see. It will be really important to us during Starliner One to see how those performance enhancements yield in a thermal environment. On the mechanical side, we're not able to address that with the current design. That's what's driving the need to do a modification to the poppet. That will take some time, but those design modifications will be implemented on the crewed vehicle before we fly crew.
We are also partnering with Boeing to make additional spacecraft improvements to increase reliability and our overall safety margin on the vehicle. Boeing will integrate new batteries that we're going to build. They'll make targeted improvements to the parachutes by strengthening some of the seams, and they will add a data recorder to the vehicle. Our goal is to fly Starliner One as soon as the vehicle and the team is ready. We really need to see how those thermal modifications perform on the spacecraft, and we intend to put the propulsion system through its paces. We'll do a series of on-orbit demonstrations and tests, stress the thrusters, and we'll take that set of data coming out of the mission, combined with the redesign, and that's what will inform the final crewed vehicle certification. We will fly the Starliner One mission with stricter performance parameters in place when we're flying closer to space station. Long-term, we are committed to Starliner certification and ensuring commercial crew access to low Earth orbit. With the six Atlas rockets remaining, we do intend to use all of those, but the Atlases do have limited-life components in them, so there's still some risk there as they get older and older. Part of the contract scope, as you had heard the administrator mention, is certification, human rating of the Vulcan rocket. To address that risk, but also to put us in a good position for the future transportation capabilities we need in low Earth orbit. We are restoring our ability to order flights five and six. I'm not authorizing them at this time. That's something we would do when we get closer to the flight need date and when we're further along in certification of the crewed Starliner. I do want to thank the commercial crew, space station, engineering, safety, operations, and Boeing teams for their dedication and incredible commitment over the past two years, getting us to this point. I'm deeply grateful for their technical expertise and their resiliency. And with that, I will turn it over to our new Starliner Two commander, Woody.
Thanks, Dana. And thank you all for being here today. It's an honor to be with you. I want to start by recognizing Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. CFT, as you know, was a remarkably challenging mission, and Butch and Suni conducted themselves with the utmost of professionalism, competence, and humility throughout the mission. They are American heroes, and I am deeply humbled to follow in their footsteps. I also want to thank the administrator and our leadership team for earlier this year declaring CFT a Type A mishap. That declaration went a long way toward restoring trust and building the culture of accountability that human spaceflight requires. I have enormous confidence in the decisions we're announcing today. We're putting the program on a path to correct the key technical deficiencies and return to crewed flight as soon as we're ready. I want to talk briefly about the vehicle, Starliner. I'm in training on Starliner, and there's a lot that's right with this vehicle. I've flown a lot of types of aircraft, and let me tell you, Starliner is a pilot's spacecraft. Starliner gives the crew real capabilities to respond to off-nominal events. These were exercised during CFT, and along with our expert flight control team, the manual control capabilities on Starliner were critical to achieving a safe docking, despite numerous thruster failures. In fact, the deepest layer of Starliner's capability in this area, backup control, was not exercised on CFT. We originally planned to test that on the way downhill, and I'm looking forward to completing that objective on the next crewed flight.
We have a lot of work ahead. I've personally been tied in with the technical teams for quite some time, and I specifically want to commend the Boeing and NASA team that executed the thruster tests out at White Sands in 2025. These tests were well executed and gave us a far better understanding of the physics governing poppet extrusion and RCS injector performance. Specifically, as Dana mentioned, we had an understanding from the beginning that there's a significant temperature component to this phenomenon. But we now, sitting here today, understand that it's more than just temperature. And with this new understanding, leadership is acting swiftly to recommend the SM RCS poppet redesign that we're announcing here today. As Dana mentioned, we already have a number of thermal modifications in place on Starliner One, and I am expecting a thorough test campaign to qualify the poppet-specific redesign after Starliner One. Bottom line, we're on the right path to fixing the SM issues for crewed flight.
I want to zoom out briefly and recognize the Independent Program Investigation Team. I've read their report, of course, and take their findings very seriously. We all take their findings very seriously. On each of the three big CFT anomalies: so the SM RCS thruster fail-offs, the helium leaks, and the failed CM crew module thruster. I am confident in our evolving understanding of the proximate cause and in the redesign, development, and testing pathway that we are on today. I expect that all three of these technical issues will be resolved for crewed flight. So what keeps me up at night? It's not the hardware, it's the underlying pattern. The Pit, the Program Investigation Team, they zoomed out and looked at root causes, so the organizational causes, and they identified three. And I want to highlight one of those today. It was inadequate systems engineering and integration creating gaps in hardware qualification. In the case of the helium leaks and the crew module RCS failures, the unqualified environment was actually on the ground, not in space. And we now know that the hardware damage occurred before liftoff. It is, I believe, critical that we deeply understand not just the hardware issues themselves, but the conditions that allowed major gaps in critical systems to go unnoticed so that they cannot surprise us again. So this reaches beyond propulsion. And as recommended by the Program Investigation Team, we must provide evidence to demonstrate that all Starliner subsystems have been reevaluated for qualification due to the misses in operational environments. That work is underway today, and I expect it will continue beyond Starliner One.
And leading up to crewed flight, it's ultimately about validation. Does the integrated system actually work in its real environment? Unfortunately, every flight to date has had major unexpected anomalies in critical systems. As we know, Ahmed said it perfectly back in February: the test and qual approach has to match how you build the vehicle, and unfortunately, we've been relatively hardware-poor and test-poor, and we needed to be test-rich. So achieving operational reliability at the integrated system level is the hard work that we have ahead. So that brings me to Starliner One. Starliner One is going to be a key step forward in that development effort to get back to crewed flight. Flight is, of course, the ultimate validation test. Starliner One is going to accomplish some key objectives. It'll be the first flight with those thermal shunts. We hope to see good performance out of those and more broadly, validate the thermal environment and inform the ongoing valve redesign effort. We're also going to validate GNC changes. Starliner One will be the first flight of what we call Omach off-pulsing, which is a somewhat significant change, and I'll be looking forward. I'll personally be watching that closely because we do expect to fly that on future missions as well. We will see anomalies. Every single human spaceflight mission and even cargo mission experiences anomalies. What I'm looking for is flattening in the learning curve, hopefully moving from major anomalies to more minor ones. And I'm expecting that every flight in space will make us better, and Starliner One will be no exception. I'm deeply honored to be part of this team. We do have a lot of work ahead, but I believe we're moving in the right direction, and I am deeply committed to returning Starliner to crewed flight. With that, over to John Mulholland, our Boeing program manager.
Thank you, Administrator, Dana, Woody. Thank you guys for your support. NASA and Boeing believe that Starliner is on track for a safe and successful mission in the December-January timeframe, as we support NASA in the final reviews of the two remaining IFAs and the corrective actions for the applicable Starliner One Pit recommendations. I'm pleased to be here with NASA to talk about our work together over the past two years to get us to this point. I'm also excited to share how we will work with NASA to learn from that flight and incorporate enhancements to the spacecraft to achieve a crewed configuration for crewed missions for Starliner Two and beyond. Over the last two years, we've completed a tremendous amount of work with a safety-first mindset to identify and correct the issues encountered during the crewed flight test. We've done this in partnership with NASA, and together, we've implemented corrective actions for the technical and cultural issues identified in NASA's Pit report. That report, when it was published in February, validated much of the technical work in progress. I appreciate NASA's leadership, partnership, and our strong working relationship to accomplish all the progress in these last two years, particularly addressing the propulsion issues. We brought the best of Boeing and NASA together. The team thoroughly analyzed the anomalies, developed design and operational solutions, and demonstrated those through an expanded test campaign. We also identified remaining sensitivities and designed mitigations that will increase our robustness and ensure long-term supportability for NASA's commercial crew efforts.
Our strong partnership and Dana's leadership on NASA's LEO program has enabled Boeing and NASA to align on a configuration for crewed missions that will take Starliner into the next decade to serve ISS and other LEO missions. The crew configuration includes enhancements to the spacecraft codified in the modifications we're discussing today, and we're excited to begin that work. Thank you, Dana, for your leadership and vision, and of course, for yours, Administrator Isaacman. In fact, NASA has already approved approximately 90% of all Starliner human spaceflight certification requirements. So we're in great shape for Starliner One and the certification ahead of the Starliner Two mission in 2028. Boeing and NASA are committed to Starliner as a long-term provider of U.S. human spaceflight to low Earth orbit. Before we speak to the contract modifications and enhancements we'll make to achieve the crewed configuration, let me speak first to the Starliner One mission. NASA and Boeing, as I mentioned, are confident in Starliner for the uncrewed mission. The safety findings from CFT have been addressed. We've worked corrective action plans for the Starliner One Pit recommendations, and out of the 21 CFT in-flight anomalies, 19 are closed. The remaining actions are expected to close in October. Some of the mitigations require in-flight demonstration, which we'll achieve during Starliner One.
As an example of the technical achievements since our crewed flight, in preparation for Starliner One, we fixed the helium manifold leakage by replacing the seal material. We've implemented design and operational mitigations to the predominantly thermally driven issue on the service module RCS thrusters, and implemented the mitigations, as mentioned, to prevent the ground environmentally driven corrosion on the CM RCS thrusters. Starliner One will launch in the December-January timeframe in alignment with the ISS manifest. Now to the Starliner One contract modifications. Dana mentioned those in detail, but we will replace the valves on all 12 CM thrusters on each of the two spacecraft. In fact, that is already underway as we speak. It's going to allow us to start with pristine valves, accompanied with the mitigations that will prevent the corrosion that we've experienced in the past. We'll redesign the RCS thruster poppets, as mentioned, to mitigate that sensitivity. We'll put a higher-frequency data recorder on the spacecraft to get higher-frequency recording of the CM thrusters, so we can better monitor the performance of those thrusters. Our team developed a parachute joint redesign as a design improvement, and we've recently developed and tested and will implement that prior to Starliner Two. And then integrating the upgraded battery systems. We mentioned the Vulcan human rating and the fifth and the sixth Starliner missions. Integration of the Starliner with the Vulcan rocket and the certification will be in anticipation of missions beyond the six that we have on contract. And with these enhancements, Starliner is on track for human spaceflight certification after Starliner One and the contracted enhancements. Starliner will be ready to meet the certification requirements.
The enhancements being made to Starliner demonstrate NASA and Boeing's commitment to Starliner being a long-term provider of human spaceflight capability to LEO. Let me recap: Starliner is on track for the uncrewed Starliner One mission. NASA and Boeing are focused on the hardware enhancements for Starliner crewed missions, which we're planning to start with Starliner Two. The enhancements demonstrate NASA and Boeing's commitment to safety and Starliner being a long-term provider of human spaceflight capability in LEO. We'll also integrate Vulcan for missions beyond the six on contract, and NASA and Boeing are committed to Starliner being a long-term provider of human spaceflight capability to LEO. Thank you.
Thank you all. We'll now move into questions from the media. For those joining us by phone, please press star one to enter the question queue. For those here in the room, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to come to you. To help us get to as many questions as possible, please limit yourself to one question at a time, and let us know which of our participants you'd like to answer. We'll begin here in the room, front row.
Hi, Will Robinson Smith with Spaceflight Now. Thank you all for the time and for a very informative update. Question to Commander Hoburg and to Dana. In the trainings for the previously crewed, now uncrewed Starliner One, there were Canadian in the loop and Josh Kutryk, who is about to fly to station later this week, weather permitting, as well as I believe a couple of Japanese astronauts that have rotated and changed throughout the years. Is the intention still to fly this as an international cadre of astronauts, and do you, I guess, how far down this process do you imagine the seat swap agreement with Roscosmos might factor into the Starliner program? Thanks.
I'll let, I guess I'll say that my understanding of the forward plan is that Starliner will be a crew rotation vehicle. So we would expect, you know, international partners to be flying on it. And I'll let Dana address the details.
Yeah. We, as you know, we don't make crew assignments this early out other than very special crew assignment that we're making today. So a lot of that work is still in front of us. We do have agreements with our partners. So I understand, for example, how many European seats there are in the future, how many Japanese seats, but there's any number of different factors that kind of shuffle where people are. The key thing for us is it does take a little bit more time for the pilot training. So we'll have our eye on assigning a pilot in the right amount of time to train with Woody. We have a lot more flexibility, though, with the other two seats. And so you'll see us making those assignments as we get much closer.
Thanks. Irene Klotz with Aviation Week. First, just a quick follow-on to Will's question. Can you just specifically say whether Starliner Two is a crew rotation mission or a flight test? And for John, the valve issues, is this different than what was experienced ahead of the OFT-2 mission? And if it's the same issue, why? Didn't the mitigations that took effect back in 2021, why weren't those fixed for the crew flight test?
Absolutely. Do you want to take the first part?
Yeah, I'll take the first one. My goal would be that Starliner Two is a crew rotation mission. We will be adaptable. We will look at data. We'll make sure we've thoroughly scrubbed what we learned from Starliner One. That's my overall goal. I will say that however we look at the flight, when you put humans on a flight, when you put crew on a flight, you have to have the right certification period. And so whether that crew is staying up there for two weeks or six
Months, that's not really the big swinger in the overall risk, as you saw during CFT. It's the free flight periods, it's the exercising of the thrusters in those dynamic environments. So I take that certification very seriously. And that's what I'm really focused on right now.
The thruster issues that we experienced on CFT were very similar to those experienced on previous flights. That led us really to focus very heavily and make sure that we fully address the issues this time. And we have. So we gave the engineers time and space and we not only came up with detailed root cause, implemented the design solutions. There's three design solutions that we implemented from a hardware standpoint. Because this is predominantly a thermally driven issue. And so the thermal mitigations and the operational mitigations, and Woody talked about the off-ohmic pulsing to reduce the burden on the RCS thrusters. And then I think most importantly, the team's entire focus was to make sure we went and did an expanded test program to prove that the mitigations work. And so we took one of the dog houses or the pods that have the ohmic and the RCS thrusters in the service module. And we actually tested them in the CFT configuration and then stood down, implemented all of the modifications, and then repeated those tests. And significantly more with the modifications incorporated to prove that we solved this problem. And so, with the modifications that we've incorporated, the thrusters are about 100 degrees cooler than they were. And this being a thermally driven problem gives us a lot of margin on that capability. As mentioned though, with the poppet and the remaining sensitivity, the other contributor, as Dana mentioned, was mechanical wear life. And what we saw at the end of that test series was some small degradation in performance on the 1 to 2% range. But because we couldn't analytically or test bound that, we decided that for the crewed missions, we're going to go implement a poppet redesign to fully solve that issue moving forward.
Did that address the valve corrosion?
So that was on the SMCS on the thrusters. Again, we went in, pulled hardware, did extensive testing. And what we see anytime you fire one of the CM thrusters, it's a monoprop hydrazine thruster. You get a tiny amount of what we call dribble volume, remaining hydrazine propellant that is just downstream of the valve. When in combination with carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, which allowed long term corrosion on those thrusters, giving us the issues that we saw. So we were pulling all of the thrusters. We're going to replace them with new valves, as I mentioned. But then we're going to incorporate mitigations. The mitigations are pretty extensive. Every time we fire the thruster or when it returns from landing, we're going to immediately pull vacuum on all 12 of those thrusters to get rid of the hydrazine. And then immediately after, we'll implement a nitrogen purge on all of the chambers to eliminate the carbon dioxide that would be in there. So getting rid of both of those contributors. The other thing that we implemented, just to give us confidence longer term, is we're actually going to do a hot fire of the CM RCS thrusters in the C3PF before we roll out and integrate on the launch vehicle, giving us confidence that all those mitigations have worked over time. And then we'll do a CM hot fire when we're docked at the International Space Station to provide some additional confidence right before we undock and come home. All the thrusters are healthy.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the phone from Eric Berger with Ars Technica.
Hi. Thank you very much. Question, I guess, for John Mulholland. I understand Boeing did not provide pricing to vendors this summer as part of the RFP process. Do you anticipate keeping seat prices similar to what NASA is paying for commercial crew, or do you think prices are going to go higher in the 2030s? And then either for Dana or Jared, how much is NASA paying above the previous commercial crew commitments to Boeing to help solve the propulsion issues and help certify Vulcan? Thanks.
For the first part on the Vulcan, obviously, we couldn't provide detailed pricing to the cloud suppliers as the Vulcan rocket has not been certified. The spacecraft has not been certified, and we don't have detailed pricing on the Vulcan that will come in the future. And obviously we want to be as competitive as possible.
And to answer your question about the value for the upgrades to both the spacecraft upgrades, including the thrusters and everything you've heard summarized today, plus the Vulcan certification, that is 359 million. So that's for that part. Separately, there's missions five and six. Those actually stayed at the exact same pricing. So there was no change to those.
Our next question will come from over the phone as well. That'll be from Marcia Dunn with the Associated Press.
Yes. Hi, Marcia Dunn, Associated Press. I'm wondering, Starliner has suffered greatly in public perception. And it's one thing to get NASA astronauts to strap in, but it's going to be another to convince private people to climb aboard, to fly to private stations. So why not just simply look elsewhere at this point, like Blue Origin or someone else? How are you going to overcome this public perception? Thanks.
I'm sorry. That's kind of an interesting... you're asking why would we look elsewhere? I mean, both Dragon and Starliner are currently under contract and have been for some time. So if NASA was going to walk away from our commitments to Boeing in this program, we would have done it in February earlier this year. In fact, most of that press conference, as we said at the time and even reiterated today, was about the cultural issues inside NASA that we wanted to correct. But we always were committed to seeing this through with Boeing. And now we're on a very good path to getting an uncrewed demonstration before the end of the year. You've got a commander named for Starliner 2 and several more missions that we expect to fly through the remaining life of the space station. And hopefully those additional missions go as we expect them to do. It's why we've, whether in bed or work closely alongside our partner to get to the right outcome, inspires confidence in other potential paying customers to take advantage of a vehicle that will be freshly certified at some point on a new launch vehicle. In order to be able to serve needs in low Earth orbit well beyond the International Space Station.
Thank you. Next question will come from Joey Roulette with Reuters.
Hi. Thanks. Joey, Reuters. Sorry. One second. I'm curious if anyone can just kind of give a better breakdown on the transition between Dragon and Starliner if or when Starliner comes online. Launching crewed missions, when does the Dragon capsule leave the program, essentially? And has NASA asked SpaceX to continue flying Dragon, depending on the readiness of Starliner? Thanks.
Sure. We know the same as you. It is the long term goal for SpaceX to discontinue Dragon and F9, but they have been a constant and steady partner with us in supporting ISS. I don't expect that to change in the short term in terms of their future plans and how long they intend to fly. I think that's their future decision, SpaceX. My goal, as it always has been for the Commercial Crew program, is to get two providers up and flying. And so it is important to me that we get Boeing Starliner certified. I would love to see a world towards the end of station where I can fly Starliner at a higher rate. I'd like to get it up to the same operational cadence as what we've had with Dragon. So my longer term goal, I'd love to do back to back missions towards the end, since Starliner is what we're intending to continue flying into the future. So that's my longer term goal.
Thank you. Next question will come from in the room in the back in the gray.
Hi. Bill Harwood with CBS. For Dana. Along those same lines, can you clarify how many flights of Dragon and Starliner is NASA currently committed to, and how many would be the outer range of that going through into station? In other words, what's the baseline right now and what could it be depending on how long you fly station, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I think I understand your question. We just announced the purchase of three additional Dragon missions. We do have a lot of flexibility in our contract in terms of when and how we execute those missions. You've watched us doing that as we've had to shuffle around with Starliner's readiness. My goal and my ideal state is to always have a vehicle behind the vehicle that's ready. So in an ideal state, I'd have enough capability. So if I had an issue, whether it be a rocket that's grounded or an issue with a crewed vehicle, I can make an adjustment and bring in another vehicle. I tend to purchase in increments. So for example, when you're building a crewed vehicle, you need a certain amount of refurbishment and purchase time for long lead parts. And so I do those buys incrementally. That's what you just saw with my last set of SpaceX purchases. Boeing, I'm getting that in place also in terms of the amount of time they need to order long lead parts. So that I do have that extensibility as we move into mission and flight planning.
But how many Dragons are you committed to today and Starliner? How many committed to as of today?
So I have in total up to Crew 17. Now with those three additional vehicles that I bought from SpaceX. And then we have the five crewed missions, Starliner 1 and then five crewed mission capability for Boeing. I have not authorized those missions five and six though. So those are kind of options available to me.
Thank you. Next question will come from in the room. Front row in the blue.
Hi, Asher Brinkman with Launch Heaven Media. I wanted to ask about what work must be completed in order to certify Starliner to fly on Vulcan. I know SLC-41 has a crew access tower, so I was wondering what kind of work remains to have that work with Vulcan and Starliner, and then what variant will Starliner fly on Vulcan, whether it be the 0, 2, 4, or 6 SRB variants, and then just any other kind of work ahead? Thanks.
On the Vulcan, it'll be the Vulcan with two solids with the 85K upper stage. And so the work is in two parts. The physical work of integrating the Starliner onto the Vulcan. We'll need a new launch vehicle adapter. We'll maintain the same interface on the spacecraft. That'll definitely simplify the technical design effort. We'll do wind tunnel tests, because we really need to understand the loads, the loads that vehicle imparts on Starliner and the loads that Starliner would impart on the Vulcan. And make sure all of that maintains the margin that's required. And then the other part of it is the human rating certification. So you've got to go into the NASA standard for launch vehicle certification and show compliance to all of those requirements. And that's the bulk of the work.
