Company officials remain conspicuously silent after Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft returns

The summary

• Boeing officials have made few public comments about the company’s Starliner spacecraft in the past six weeks.

• The capsule returned to Earth without a crew on Saturday, ending a troubled test flight.

• Boeing representatives were not present at the briefing after the landing, although they were originally scheduled to attend.

Just over an hour after Boeing’s Starliner capsule returned to Earth unmanned, NASA held a standard post-landing briefing to discuss the end of the tumultuous test flight.

Conspicuously absent from the early Saturday morning meeting: not a single Boeing official.

The last time Boeing representatives participated in a press conference about the Starliner mission was in late July. At that point, the capsule had already spent weeks longer than expected on the International Space Station due to hardware problems, and there were questions about whether the two NASA astronauts who rode the Boeing-made vehicle into space would be able to return safely.

NASA officials have said they want to work closely with Boeing, but the company’s absence from events and limited public statements have raised questions about Boeing’s commitment to transparency and the future of the Starliner program.

Boeing did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the company’s changed public visibility.

Ahead of last week’s post-landing news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a NASA public announcement included the names of two Boeing officials who would participate.

Eric Berger, a senior editor for Ars Technica who was there, wrote on X that two chairs had been removed from the stage shortly before the briefing. The seating arrangement appeared to have been changed at the last minute.

Joel Montalbano, the deputy associate director of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, was asked about Boeing’s absence during the briefing

“We have spoken to Boeing about this. They have asked NASA to represent the mission,” he said.

In response to a question from NBC News a few days later, a NASA spokesperson referred to Montalbano’s response to the press conference.

Instead of attending the briefing, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, issued a statement on the company’s website.

“I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, reentry and landing,” he wrote. “We will review the data and determine next steps for the program.”

Boeing said the capsule would be taken to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where engineers would analyze data from the flight. No other details were provided about the spacecraft’s status.

Starliner launched astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in early June. The capsule’s first crewed test flight, the mission was expected to last about eight days. But helium leaks in the spacecraft’s propulsion system and a booster failure that occurred during docking with the space station kept Starliner and its crew on the sidelines for months.

NASA held several press conferences over the summer to provide updates on the ongoing investigation into the thruster problems and what the findings might mean for the rest of the flight. Initially, NASA and Boeing officials appeared together at the briefings, but Boeing representatives did not attend the press conferences in August.

That month, NASA deliberated over how and when to bring Wilmore and Williams home safely. Agency officials, asked about Boeing’s absence from most of those August briefings, said the company’s representatives did not participate because the updates related to NASA deliberations.

On Aug. 24, the agency announced it would ask SpaceX to bring the astronauts home, sending Boeing’s Starliner back to Earth without a crew aboard. The pair are scheduled to remain at the space station until February, then return with members of a future ISS crew.

In a statement about X following NASA’s decision, Boeing wrote: “We remain focused primarily on the safety of the crew and spacecraft. We are executing the mission as defined by NASA and preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful unmanned reentry.”

The Starliner capsule ultimately returned to Earth without incident, landing just after midnight on Saturday at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

The manned test flight was intended to demonstrate that Boeing could reliably transport astronauts to and from the space station, clearing the way for NASA to certify the aircraft for routine flights to the space laboratory.

Boeing developed the Starliner spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative launched in 2011 to support privately built spacecraft to fill the gap left by NASA’s retired space shuttles.

Even before its most recent flight, the Starliner program was already more than $1.5 billion over budget and years behind schedule. In 2019, an unmanned test flight to the space station was aborted due to technical problems, forcing the company to retry it in 2022.

Rival company SpaceX developed its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the same program and has been conducting routine flights to and from the space station since 2020. NASA has indicated that it wants both private companies to become certified for such flights, so that there are redundant options for reaching low-Earth orbit.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com