NASA announces that the International Space Station crew rotation will continue with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Elon Musk's space company may take over the Crew-10 mission from next February and the Crew-11 mission in July, although NASA wanted the new Starliner spacecraft to be operational at the beginning of 2025, he writes. Space news.
As is known, after the closure of the Space Shuttle program, Boeing won the US space agency's tender to build a new spaceship. The development of CST-100 did not go smoothly, and was delayed for half a decade, causing losses estimated at several billion dollars. It carried humans to the International Space Station for the first time in the summer of 2024, but at the end of the scheduled ten-day mission, it was unable to return due to the failure of the positioning nozzles. After a three-month hibernation, it finally returned to Earth empty and without errors, but its passengers, Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, remain on the space station even when the pages are closed, until its return next February.
The months of uncertainty caused by the error caused serious friction between the office and the company. A side thread is that a random quality assurance inspection found a serious flaw at a Boeing factory, which also has frightening defects in its passenger carriers, where untrained workers built SLS launch vehicles for the Artemis program.
The Starliner could fly into space next in mid-2025, but it doesn't have the necessary clearance to do so yet. NASA has diplomatically stated that it will be able to comment on the date of the next Starliner flight when it becomes clear when and how Boeing wants to obtain flight clearance for its spacecraft.
The flight of the Starliner depends not only on this: the Vice President of NASA said that they have not yet decided whether they consider it necessary to conduct a successful test flight before full use.
According to information provided by NASA, it turns out that they are continuing to cooperate with the Russian space agency Roscosmos and bring and receive astronauts from each other. The Soyuz spacecraft is expected to be launched to the International Space Station in late 2025 and 2026.
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