NASA freezes Starliner missions

Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now.

For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.

They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.

> Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been delayed to at least around a year from now

No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.

Would think that timeline is more likely to be extended than shortened. There will be successor missions, and other space use cases for which derivatives of an astronaut transfer vehicle have value.

The bigger question will be whether it's better for Boeing to take the relatively low cost option of fixing the propulsion system which to some extent is their third party supplier's issue, in a funding environment where operating actual missions is more favourably funded than R&D, or whether that's sunk cost fallacy when SpaceX is clearly ahead of them.

> that timeline is more likely to be extended than shortened

For the ISS? Based on what? It’s most likely to remain where it is.

It probably won't be extended, but there isn't no reason for people to think otherwise. It has been extended in the past, and NASA's own white paper from this year says that extension is a possibility if there are no commercial LEO stations suitable to NASA by 2030 and if Russia agrees to continue their participation. This is despite the contract for the Deorbit Vehicle already being awarded to SpaceX; it would simply wait until later.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...