Boeing CFT Starliner Stranded Astronauts (2024-25)

Introduction

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule had been years behind schedule and well over a billion dollars over budget (overruns Boeing absorbed under a fixed-price contract) before its first crewed test flight in June 2024. The Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission was intended to demonstrate Starliner's readiness to carry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Programme — the same programme that had already certified SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

What was planned as an eight-to-14-day mission became a 286-day stay aboard the ISS. In January and February 2025, Donald Trump and Elon Musk said the astronauts had been "abandoned" or "left up there for political reasons" by the Biden administration. That is the claim this page examines. The long stay is undisputed; "abandoned" is contradicted by NASA's record, and the political-motive and earlier-rescue claims are unsupported.

The Mission and Technical Failures

Starliner launched from Cape Canaveral on 5 June 2024 carrying NASA astronauts Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Suni' Williams. During the approach to the ISS, the spacecraft experienced helium leaks in the service module and five of its twenty-eight reaction control system thrusters failed. Four of the five thrusters were eventually recovered, allowing docking to proceed. The spacecraft docked with the ISS on 6 June 2024.

NASA and Boeing engineers spent the subsequent weeks analysing the thruster failures, conducting ground tests, and assessing whether Starliner could safely return the crew. The core concern was whether the thruster failures, if they recurred during re-entry manoeuvring, could compromise the crew's safety.

NASA's Decision — August 2024

On 24 August 2024, NASA announced that Starliner would return to Earth uncrewed. Administrator Bill Nelson called the decision to keep Wilmore and Williams aboard "the result of our commitment to safety," and NASA said "the uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence does not meet the agency's safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight." NASA's later Program Investigation Team report recorded that the recommendation "was presented and unanimously accepted by Agency leadership." Starliner undocked on 6 September 2024 and landed under parachutes at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, at 12:01 a.m. EDT on 7 September. The uncrewed flight went well: the service-module thrusters worked as required. It did not settle the question, though. Boeing's engineers insisted the capsule could have brought the crew home safely, and NASA's Steve Stich agreed that with a crew aboard "it would have been a safe, successful landing" — while the investigation reported that one crew-module thruster failed during descent.

Wilmore and Williams were integrated into the ISS Expedition 71/72 crew. NASA announced on 24 August that they would fly home on SpaceX's Crew-9 Dragon, which launched on 28 September 2024 with two seats left open for them, and said they would return in February 2025. In December 2024 NASA said Crew-9's return would slip because SpaceX needed more time to prepare a new Dragon for Crew-10, and in February 2025 NASA switched Crew-10 to a different Dragon capsule (Endurance), bringing the planned return forward. Wilmore and Williams splashed down off Tallahassee, Florida, on 18 March 2025, 286 days after launch — roughly 20 to 35 times the planned eight-to-14-day mission.

The Political Framing

In late January 2025, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to "go get" the two astronauts, "who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration." Musk replied on X: "Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long." On 18 February Musk told Fox News: "They were left up there for political reasons." In a later X post he wrote that "SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago," that he had "OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused," and that the return "WAS pushed back for political reasons."

The record does not support the accusation. CNN reported in March 2025 that there was "no publicly available evidence for that assertion." Musk said he did not make the alleged offer directly to NASA, and a former senior Biden White House official and a former senior NASA official told CNN they never heard of it. NASA had already planned in August 2024 to bring the astronauts home on Crew-9, and CNN reported that the Dragon that flew them home on 18 March was the next one available. The astronauts rejected the "abandoned" label: "We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded," Wilmore said in February 2025. He later said that "in certain respects, we were stuck," but that they were "nowhere near" being "left and forgotten."

NASA's own statements on who sped up the return differ by date. In mid-February CNN reported that NASA had made "no indication the schedule change was prompted by a directive from Trump." NASA's 18 March release then quoted acting Administrator Janet Petro: "Per President Trump's direction, NASA and SpaceX worked diligently to pull the schedule a month earlier." NASA's Joel Montalbano told reporters that when the President asked SpaceX in January what it would take to bring the crew home, "we were already looking at options," and later added that NASA "got the input from the White House."

Musk's company SpaceX is Boeing's competitor in NASA's Commercial Crew Program. NASA's Office of Inspector General reported in June 2026 that NASA "has already spent an extra $17 million to accelerate SpaceX flights originally planned for Starliner." That is context for weighing Musk's claims, not proof that they are wrong.

What NASA's Reviews Found

NASA's Office of Inspector General has not ruled on whether the August 2024 decision was political. Its June 2026 audit of the Commercial Crew Program (IG-26-011) describes the decision as risk reduction: "In an effort to mitigate the risk to the crew resulting from these issues, NASA elected to have them stay on the ISS until March 2025 while the vehicle returned uncrewed in September 2024." The audit found that NASA was "initially overconfident in Boeing" and accepted unrealistic schedules.

NASA's Program Investigation Team, chartered in February 2025 and reporting in November 2025, examined the technical and organisational causes. Its report, released on 19 February 2026, recorded that the recommendation to return Starliner uncrewed "was presented and unanimously accepted by Agency leadership" on 24 August 2024. Interviews showed a split: "Most NASA interviewees agreed that returning the crew on Dragon was ultimately the right decision while many Boeing employees disagreed, downplaying the technical risks," the report says. It also found that the propulsion system "lacked required two-fault tolerance for deorbit burns, which was a design flaw present since early development but not identified until CFT pre-launch." The report does not address the allegations by Trump and Musk, and it was commissioned by NASA, the agency that made the decision.

It did identify one non-engineering pressure. Administrator Jared Isaacman said NASA "permitted overarching programmatic objectives of having two providers capable of transporting astronauts to-and-from orbit, influence engineering and operational decisions, especially during and immediately after the mission." The report's third root cause says this objective produces a culture "emphasizing risk acceptance that supports flight rationale" that "leads to an increase in accepted risk." That is an institutional pressure to keep two providers viable, not evidence of the partisan motive alleged.

Boeing's Losses

Boeing reported $523 million of Starliner charges for 2024, bringing the total it has paid for overruns on its fixed-price NASA contract to about $2 billion. The financial damage to Boeing was real and significant.

Verdict

Unsubstantiated. The claim, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk made it, is that the Biden administration "abandoned" Wilmore and Williams in space, kept them there for political reasons, and could have had SpaceX bring them home months earlier. The long stay is undisputed background rather than the claim: Starliner's technical failures turned a planned eight-to-14-day test flight into a 286-day stay, and NASA decided that bringing the crew home on Starliner was too risky. The "abandoned" limb is contradicted by NASA's record: NASA's Mission Management Team accepted Starliner as a safe haven on 7 June 2024, NASA's FAQ says the docked SpaceX Crew-8 Dragon then served as the emergency return spacecraft until Crew-9 arrived, and NASA's 24 August 2024 announcement assigned the astronauts to Crew-9. The political-motive and earlier-rescue limb rests on statements by Trump and Musk. CNN reported that NASA's Stich said the next Dragon able to bring them home was the one that did, which CNN said suggests SpaceX had no separate vehicle for an earlier dedicated mission; that Montalbano said NASA was "already looking at options" when the President asked in January; and that a former senior Biden White House official and a former senior NASA official never heard of Musk's alleged offer. CNN found "no publicly available evidence" for the accusation, and no public document supports it. NASA's own release did credit President Trump's direction with pulling the return schedule forward by a month, well short of the "several months" Musk alleged.

What Would Change Our Verdict

• Documentary evidence that NASA leadership overrode engineering recommendations for political reasons
• Internal communications showing the uncrewed return decision was made on non-safety grounds
• Evidence that the thruster failures were less serious than publicly described
• Documentation that SpaceX made a concrete, feasible offer of an earlier return that the White House or NASA declined

The Failure Mechanism: Doghouses, Seals, and a Deorbit-Burn Risk

Starliner's problems traced to two linked systems in its service module. The reaction control thrusters sit in four external propulsion pods that NASA and Boeing engineers call "doghouses." As Starliner fired its thrusters repeatedly during the approach to the ISS on 5 June 2024, heat built up inside these pods faster than it could dissipate — a design and thermal-management shortfall that degraded seals inside the thruster valves and caused several of them to swell and restrict propellant flow. Five of Starliner's 28 reaction control thrusters dropped offline as the capsule closed in on the station, and commander Butch Wilmore had to take manual control for part of the approach as automated guidance lost authority over the vehicle's orientation.

At the same time, the service module was leaking helium — the inert gas used to pressurize the propellant lines — from multiple points in the system, independent of the thruster problem. Engineers could not fully separate the two failures on the ground. NASA's later Program Investigation Team found that seven of the eight service-module helium manifolds leaked during the mission, and that the propulsion system "lacked required two-fault tolerance for deorbit burns, which was a design flaw present since early development but not identified until CFT pre-launch." That combined uncertainty, rather than a single clear-cut fault, is why NASA kept Wilmore and Williams on the ISS rather than fly them home in a capsule whose thrusters had already failed once. Officials repeatedly stressed that the station was functioning as a safe harbor, not an emergency shelter, giving NASA and Boeing what officials called "the luxury of time" to run matching thrusters through weeks of firing sequences at White Sands Test Facility, trying to reproduce the failure before risking a crewed re-entry.

Official Findings: The Uncrewed Return and the Crew-9 Rescue

Five days after its initial 24 August 2024 decision, NASA and Boeing formally polled "go" on 29 August to proceed with an uncrewed return, targeting undocking at 6:04 p.m. EDT on 6 September and a landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, around 12:03 a.m. the following morning. Ground teams uploaded software changes letting Starliner undock, re-enter and land autonomously, with remote command capability held in reserve. Given the earlier thruster problems, NASA also shortened the departure timeline to get Starliner well away from the station as quickly as possible. The uncrewed landing went as planned, demonstrating the capsule could still fly — without resolving whether its thrusters would have held up with a crew's added safety margins.

Wilmore and Williams' way home was set out in the same 24 August announcement: NASA reserved two of the four seats on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, which launched 28 September 2024 carrying only commander Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, deliberately leaving capacity for the pair. After Wilmore and Williams had logged 286 days in space, Crew-9's Dragon undocked, re-entered, and splashed down off Tallahassee, Florida, at 5:57 p.m. EDT on 18 March 2025 with all four aboard. NASA's mission summary put Wilmore and Williams' total flight at 4,576 orbits of Earth and roughly 121.3 million miles travelled — a mission 20 to 35 times longer than the eight-to-14-day flight originally planned.

"Stranded" or Not? The Framing Debate

NASA and the astronauts pushed back on "stranded" language long before Trump and Musk turned it into a political flashpoint. At a 28 June 2024 briefing — just over three weeks after launch — Stich told reporters: "I want to make it real clear that we're not in any rush to come home," adding that "The station is a nice, safe place to stop and take our time to work through the vehicle and make sure we're ready to come home." NASA's own Boeing Crew Flight Test FAQ addresses the question head-on: "No, Butch and Suni are safe aboard the space station," framing their extended stay as a planned integration into the station's Expedition crew rather than an emergency. Wilmore and Williams themselves rejected the "stranded" and "abandoned" labels — Wilmore later said that "in certain respects, we were stuck" but that they were "nowhere near" being left and forgotten — while acknowledging the real personal cost of nine months away from family.

That contemporaneous record complicates the later claim that the astronauts were left behind for political reasons: NASA was describing this as a controlled, monitored, safety-driven process from its very first weeks — not a cover story invented after the fact. Still, the framing fight cuts both ways. A 286-day stay is a dramatic overrun of an eight-to-14-day plan, the astronauts did not control when they could leave, and the capsule they launched on was one NASA ultimately judged too risky to fly them home. From 7 June 2024 NASA's record shows an emergency return vehicle: Starliner, then the Crew-8 Dragon (FAQ updated 30 August) until Crew-9 arrived. But their scheduled return depended on NASA's crew-rotation plan. "Not stranded" was NASA's accurate technical position; it was also, unavoidably, NASA's preferred public-relations framing for a programme failure.

Aftermath: A 2026 Mishap Report and an Uncertain Path Forward

The story didn't end at splashdown. In February 2026, NASA released the findings of its Program Investigation Team and formally declared the CFT mission a "Type A mishap" — NASA's highest severity category, also applied to the Columbia and Challenger shuttle accidents and the Apollo 1 fire — citing the loss of the spacecraft's maneuverability as the crew approached the station and the associated financial damages, even though no one was hurt and the mission regained control before docking. Spaceflight Now described the report as sharply critical of both NASA and Boeing; NASA's release said investigators identified "an interplay of combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns." Investigators reported a program culture where dissent was discouraged — "there was yelling in meetings," one account noted. Isaacman said: "the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight." The investigation made 61 recommendations to NASA for future missions.

A separate NASA Office of Inspector General audit of the Commercial Crew Program, published 30 June 2026, found Starliner still lacked human-rating certification and was unlikely to receive it before 2027 at the earliest. In November 2025 NASA and Boeing had cut the firm order to four missions (two more as options) and made the next flight, Starliner-1, a cargo flight to validate fixes before astronauts fly Starliner again. On 28 September 2026 they announced a further contract change: NASA intends to exercise the options for a fifth and sixth flight and to certify the Vulcan rocket for crew flights, the uncrewed Starliner-1 could fly in December 2026 or January 2027, and NASA's current plan is to return astronauts on Starliner-2 by 2028. With about $2 billion in cumulative Boeing charges through 2024, the mishap classification and the delayed certification timeline, the Crew Flight Test remains an open, costly chapter for Boeing's human-spaceflight programme rather than a closed one.