Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on Starliner's first crewed flight in June 2024 expecting to stay about eight days. They came home in February 2025, on a different spacecraft, after more than nine months in orbit.
Trouble began before launch, with helium leaks in the service module's propulsion system that were judged acceptable, and worsened during the approach to the station when five reaction control thrusters degraded or shut down. The crew docked successfully, but the cause was not understood: ground testing eventually suggested that a Teflon seal was swelling as the thrusters overheated, restricting propellant flow.
The question then was whether to bring the astronauts home in a vehicle whose thrusters might not work reliably during the deorbit burn and separation. Boeing's analysis said yes; NASA's engineers were not unanimous, and after weeks of review the administrator decided against it. Starliner returned uncrewed in September 2024 and landed without incident.
Wilmore and Williams were folded into the station's regular crew, and the next Dragon launched with two empty seats to bring them back. They took the extension with conspicuous good grace, repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushing back on the widespread description of themselves as stranded — they were, as they pointed out, aboard a fully provisioned space station doing useful work.
The episode was NASA's first serious test of whether it had genuinely learned the lessons of Challenger and Columbia — whether an agency under schedule and commercial pressure would accept an uncomfortable, expensive, publicly embarrassing decision to protect a crew. It did, and that is the most important thing about the flight.
