NASA and Boeing will hold a joint news conference on Monday, September 28, to discuss the development status of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the timeline for regular crewed missions to the International Space Station. The briefing comes more than a year after the Crew Flight Test that sent astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS — a mission that ended with the crew returning on a SpaceX Dragon rather than the Starliner that brought them up. The participant list signals this is a high-stakes status update, not a routine progress report. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman — who took office in early 2025 — will appear alongside Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program, astronaut Woody Hoburg, and John Mulholland, Boeing's vice president and program manager for Commercial Crew. The presence of the administrator at a contractor development briefing suggests the conversation has escalated beyond the program office. Starliner's trajectory has been one of the most protracted development stories in modern spaceflight. Originally contracted under NASA's Commercial Crew Program alongside SpaceX, Boeing has repeatedly slipped schedules while SpaceX has flown multiple operational crew rotations. The 2024 Crew Flight Test exposed thruster anomalies and helium leaks on the service module, leading NASA to judge the vehicle too risky for Wilmore and Williams' return and instead extending their stay until a SpaceX seat opened. The core question heading into Monday is binary: does Boeing have a credible path to an operational Starliner-1 mission, or is NASA preparing the ground for a significant restructuring of the program? The Commercial Crew Program was designed around dual redundancy — two independent crew vehicles serving the ISS — precisely to avoid single-provider dependency. With SpaceX as the sole operational provider, that design intent has been unmet for years. NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program framing is notable. The agency has been transitioning ISS operations toward commercial successors, and any further Starliner delays compress the window during which Boeing could fly operational missions before the station's planned deorbit. Every quarter of slippage erodes the business case for both NASA and Boeing. The briefing will air live at nasa.gov/live at 3 p.m. EDT. Media credentialed for the Crew-13 mission may attend in person at Kennedy Space Center. The press contacts listed are George Alderman and Joshua Finch at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
