It looks increasingly unlikely that the astronauts stranded at the International Space Station will return on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, and you won't believe one of the reasons why that is the case. 

NASA likely to significantly delay the launch of Crew 9 due to Starliner issues. https://t.co/ZhjNSOTd4Y

— @amuse (@amuse) August 5, 2024

Ars Technica has been doing a bang-up job covering the disaster NASA misnamed "Starliner," and they just dropped a couple of new bombshells. One that shouldn't surprise that much: NASA is going to delay SpaceX's launch to the ISS because there isn't an open dock compatible with it. 

The other reason, though, is truly shocking: the current software build for the spacecraft prevents it from undocking safely from the ISS. 

You read that right: Starliner, as it stands right now, can't undock from the ISS. 

NASA has quietly been studying the possibility of crew returning in a Dragon for more than a month. As NASA and Boeing engineers have yet to identify a root cause of the thruster failure, the possibility of Wilmore and Williams returning on a Dragon spacecraft has increased in the last 10 days. NASA has consistently said that ‘crew safety’ will be its No. 1 priority in deciding how to proceed.

The Crew 9 delay is relevant to the Starliner dilemma for a couple of reasons. One, it gives NASA more time to determine the flight-worthiness of Starliner. However, there is also another surprising reason for the delay—the need to update Starliner’s flight software. Three separate, well-placed sources have confirmed to Ars that the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

At first blush, this seems absurd. After all, Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test 2 mission in May 2022 was a fully automated test of the Starliner vehicle. During this mission, the spacecraft flew up to the space station without crew on board and then returned to Earth six days later. Although the 2022 flight test was completed by a different Starliner vehicle, it clearly demonstrated the ability of the program's flight software to autonomously dock and return to Earth. Boeing did not respond to a media query about why this capability was removed for the crew flight test.

As much as I hate to say this, I am going to start looking at who makes the aircraft I fly. Boeing products are just not safe. 

Nobody is saying why, exactly, Boeing rewrote the software in such a way that it can't do something as simple as undocking from the International Space Station, but as you will recall the first unmanned flight of the spacecraft was an utter disaster, plagued by software issues that prevented it from reaching the station at all. 

The next flight, too, was unmanned, and managed to dock and undock from the station, and while not perfect by any means it managed to accomplish its mission. 

So Boeing changed up the software to ensure it couldn't the next time? 

What are they, the Secret Service or something?

It is not clear what change Boeing officials made to the vehicle or its software in the two years prior to the launch of Wilmore and Williams. It is possible that the crew has to manually press an undock button in the spacecraft, or the purely autonomous software was removed from coding on board Starliner to simplify its software package. Regardless, sources described the process to update the software on Starliner as "non-trivial" and "significant," and that it could take up to four weeks. This is what is driving the delay to launch Crew 9 later next month.

Notably, NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich obliquely referenced this during his most recent press availability on July 25. Stich was asked whether NASA would certify Starliner for operational missions if the vehicle returned to Earth autonomously but ultimately safely.

"There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner," he said. "Starliner was designed as a spacecraft to have the crew in the cockpit. The crew is integral to the spacecraft."

It's not just Boeing that is a disaster, obviously. NASA must have signed off on the changes, which makes no sense at all. Presumably, they knew that this was a test flight and that it might not go perfectly, so downgrading the capabilities of the spacecraft while carrying human beings is insane. 

But there it is. They did it anyway, and in the process stranded their astronauts, screwed up the schedule of their one working spacecraft, the Crew Dragon, and attached a massive dead weight onto the ISS that prevents Crew Dragon from docking. 

Don't worry. Nobody will get fired. If the Secret Service is any indication the person responsible will be promoted and put in charge of investigating how this happened.