NASA and Boeing have discussed using Starliner for ten or more additional flights in the years ahead, citing people familiar with the talks. NASA’s public line was only that it is developing plans for a sustained presence in low Earth orbit and will say more soon. A Boeing spokesman said the company is committed and looks forward to the next Starliner mission. There is no published mission manifest, no funded contract amendment on the table in the Journal story, and no statement that the helium leaks and propulsion failures that defined the 2024 Crew Flight Test have been closed. We can safely treat the report as a negotiation before revival.
The hardware still has to fly empty before it can fly people. After the June 2024 test left Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the station for months and brought Starliner home without them, NASA recast the next flight, Starliner-1, as an uncrewed cargo run. The agency’s inspector general wrote in June that helium leaks and propulsion-system failures remained unresolved as of March 2026, that human-rating certification could slip to 2027 and that an uncrewed cargo mission will not by itself tick every crew-certification box. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel has described that cargo flight as still about a year away, with no firm date. NASA formally classed the 2024 flight as a Type A mishap only in 2026. Those are the evidence requirements that sit in front of any new role. A propulsion system that holds pressure and thrust through docking and undocking, a service module that does not leak helium into a critical path, parachutes that have closed their anomaly file and a mishap board whose findings are actually incorporated before the next crew boards. Cargo is the honest first assignment. Research and commercial work can ride the same uncrewed profile. Contingency crew transport and a second U.S. crew provider are the prize. They are also the missions that demand the certificate the vehicle does not yet hold.
Why the talks exist is not mysterious. The same day as the Journal story, NASA awarded SpaceX about 946 million dollars for three more Dragon crew flights through 2030. Separate reporting has said SpaceX intends to retire Crew Dragon around the end of the decade and is not building an open-ended fleet. Atlas V, Starliner’s current rocket, is itself near the end of its stock, which is why any long Starliner chapter also means certifying a new launcher. That is a second certification for which Boeing has already taken more than two billion dollars of charges on the programme. Paying some of the thruster fix and a new rocket path as other outlets have been told may be under discussion, would be a policy choice to keep two American crew doors open. It would not erase the flight-test record.
A second chapter is possible. It is not automatic. The mission types NASA could buy are cargo first, then crew if Starliner-1 and the ground work close the open faults. Commercial low-Earth-orbit stations will want the same proof. Until helium, thrusters and the human-rating file are closed in public, ten flights is a number in a conversation. The station still needs a ride that can come home with the people it carried up.