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Boeing Starliner spacecraft successfully returns to flight 29 months after ill-fated debut
More than three years after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft first safely reached orbit and almost three and a half years after Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule’s ill-fated launch debut, Boeing has finally returned to flight and made it farther than ever before towards a successful test flight.
Almost ten months after Boeing’s first attempt at Starliner’s second uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT-2 #1), the stars aligned. As expected, the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket lifted off on time at 6:54 pm EDT (22:54 UTC) on Thursday, May 19th, ascending from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) Launch Complex 41 (LC-41) without issue. After a four and a half minute burn, the Atlas V booster – powered by a Russian-built RD-180 engine – separated and the Centaur upper stage – powered by two Aerojet Rocketdyne RL-10 engines – took over.
Another six minutes later, Centaur shut down and Starliner ultimately separated from the rocket a bit less than 12 minutes after liftoff. Unlike SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, though, Starliner separated from its launch vehicle before reaching orbit – a task Boeing engineers chose to reserve for the spacecraft itself to limit stress on the spacecraft and crew in the event of a high-altitude abort. However, that design decision also adds significant risk in other ways and – after the spacecraft’s extremely poor performance during its first launch attempt – turns a Starliner launch into a sort of 30-minute cliffhanger.
While just a hair shy of true orbit, Starliner’s suborbital launch trajectory means that whether or not it wants to, the spacecraft will reenter Earth’s atmosphere about an hour after liftoff if it can’t complete a minute-long orbital insertion burn. In the case of OFT-2, that burn came about 31 minutes after liftoff and was thankfully successful, inserting Starliner into a stable, circular orbit and undoubtedly triggering a massive wave of relief for all employees involved. From that stable orbit, Starliner can finally begin to prepare to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time ever.
The story of Starliner’s tortured orbital flight test (OFT) campaign began in earnest on December 20th, 2019, when an uncrewed prototype of the Boeing spacecraft first attempted to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. Infamously, a major software bug that could have been easily detected with even the most basic integrated hardware-in-the-loop prelaunch testing caused Starliner to lose control the moment it separated from Atlas V. Only through a heroic last-second effort was Boeing able to insert Starliner into orbit and prevent the spacecraft from reentering prematurely, which would have likely destroyed it. After hundreds of seconds of unplanned burns of its many attitude control thrusters, Starliner no longer had enough propellant to safely reach the ISS.
Boeing would later correct another completely unrelated software bug mere hours before Starliner’s planned reentry and recovery. If undetected, it could have caused the spacecraft’s capsule and service sections to crash into each other shortly after separation, potentially damaging the capsule’s heat shield and dooming it to destruction during reentry. Had astronauts been aboard, either of the two software bugs could have potentially resulted in crew fatalities and total mission failure. Instead, through a combination of sheer luck and a quick emergency response from Boeing and NASA teams, the spacecraft was saved and recovered in New Mexico.
On a positive note, aside from raising deep and foreboding questions about Boeing’s software development and integrating testing capabilities and NASA’s inept and inconsistent oversight, OFT-1 did still demonstrate that Starliner was able to reach orbit, operate in space, deorbit, survive atmospheric reentry, and land softly under parachutes.
However, the problems were about to continue and spread beyond software. On July 30th, 2021, shortly before a different uncrewed Starliner was scheduled to reattempt the first Orbital Flight Test, the launch was aborted. Eventually, Boeing and NASA reported that 13 of Starliner’s 24 main oxidizer valves had failed to open during a prelaunch test just a few hours before liftoff. The resulting investigation ultimately concluded that the Aerojet Rocketdyne-supplied valves had a faulty design and that Boeing had failed to properly insulate those valves from humidity and water intrusion. It also delayed the next OFT-2 launch attempt by almost ten months.
But finally, after almost 30 months of work to rectify those software and hardware failures, Starliner has intentionally reached a stable orbit without running into a major problem – certainly cause for some amount of optimism. Still, safely rendezvousing and docking with the ISS may be the biggest and riskiest challenge Starliner has faced yet and Boeing will be attempting the feat for the first time in its modern history. Starliner is expected to begin proximity operations around 3 pm EDT on May 20th. If the first attempt is perfect, docking could occur as early as 7:10 pm EDT.
Ultimately, even if Boeing is now more than three years behind SpaceX, whose Crew Dragon spacecraft first reached orbit and the ISS in March 2019 and launched its first astronauts in May 2020, it’s essential that NASA has two redundant crew vehicles available to carry its astronauts to and from the station. SpaceX’s extraordinary success and heroic efforts have allowed the company to singlehandedly ensure NASA access to the ISS since November 2020, but no complex system is perfect and even a failure outside of SpaceX’s control could trigger a long delay that could threaten NASA’s uninterrupted presence on the International Space Station.
NASA has contracts with SpaceX to maintain that uninterrupted presence at the ISS through Crew Dragon’s Crew-7 mission, which could launch as early as September 2023 and would then return to Earth around March 2024. If OFT-2 is completed without significant issue, Boeing’s next priority is Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT), a crewed launch debut that could happen before the end of 2022.
After that, Starliner’s first operational crew launch could potentially occur in Q1 2024, just before Crew Dragon’s Crew-7 recovery. Following Crew Dragon’s near-flawless uncrewed test flight, it took another 14 months for NASA and SpaceX to proceed to Demo-2, Dragon’s Crew Flight Test equivalent. Dragon’s first operational astronaut launch occurred in November 2020, 20 months after its uncrewed demo flight. If NASA follows a similar path for Starliner, that meshes well with an operational debut in early 2024.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
