NASA LIVE | NASA Administrator Update On Butch Wilmore & Suni William Live | Boeing Straliner | N18G

to give you an update we have NASA administrator Bill Nelson associate administrator Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well boing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and tooing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission director and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programat medical and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bower Sox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jam and thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our mission safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another uh part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team has uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learned more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um ajet rocked uh the engine manufacturer uh the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA uh within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and Sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner un crude and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight Rance review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an uncrewed test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballast in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the the crew8 vehicle when Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew eight vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet we'll go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight Readiness review with a flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who' stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this 8mon stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the critical Station Main M that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the crew8 dragon probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us uh a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew N9 vehicle arrives uh crew nine with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover uh between the the crews and then we'll have crew8 undock after that we will relocate the crew9 vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy use crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soy's exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm night thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged assuring St liner returns safely now while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 mies above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they've seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exploration and moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities as evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with but and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew n Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew n Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and will provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they are finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded human space flight exploration thanks thanks Norm we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark stman CBS News uh this could be for Jim or kener Steve I I let you decide my question is about trust um I mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space Partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is ready to return astronauts home home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with Boeing I mean I'll startor I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to to balance and and I think Ken said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess coner St you well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team uh restored and ready for the next issue and and I'll acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work it uh and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model now we the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back uncrewed it needs to land at the Whit sand uh space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the nass and Bo side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a debit burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so and Mark uh Trust is a two-way street and it's built uh upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human rated vehicles I think you should understand the the trust is too ways Eric with ours Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and in your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starliner operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew Dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Boeing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the White Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simulations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the poppet on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxid ER to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused the degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed a bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other thrusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for uh Starliner one is H how do we a avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer popet Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuvering engine the big 1500 PB Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Adent thrusters so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with AET um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to find mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the wh sand results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it uh with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner U with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Marsha D on the phone lines Marsha D from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 5050 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against and also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed the ability to either work crude or uncrewed um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimously we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of uh a situation of of loss and feeling like you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to uh finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission youve worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space plan in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning Starliner safely but we have a crew eight uh mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew N9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa para from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this Brar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you or for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Starliner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will ever launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen Fischer from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were a senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience influence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their management not to launch because of the cold weather and that information never got up and that was happening on the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they' inspect the Orbiter and that as a matter of fact uh my commander hot Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would look like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever since has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room y back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply stated it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing dayto day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off all the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with Butch and sunny that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for that what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ian Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon Ean Brown Fox News for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh uh the technical and R&D review here that uh that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now uh to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I I understand this is an oversight issue and it may come from something above the agency but uh your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues and commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fix price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of Contracting Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got a a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spend so uh my answer you're you're posturing the question of what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the cost uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question prends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from Reuters thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly ortberg say uh when you talk to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um a kind of broadly defined certification is coming after Starliner FES astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far will NASA want to see Boeing apply an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certifi St liner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test Readiness review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we have not you know made a total determination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we've fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for two and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point so yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize is we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken Bowersox just I want to follow up on that that poll which you said was unanimous wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was as part of that poll was it like 10 to zero 12 how how many votes were there thank you well uh so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the NASA engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo development uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the uh commercial crew program the engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Insurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall uh JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got everybody I think did I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred with proceeding uncrewed and they stated where they might have one or two people uh during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there was a discussion on a call about if Starliner about Starliner returning uncrewed if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission fa failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so I let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that here by Steve's Trust on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question uh I'd save and pose to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us in layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties due to the inability to predict with certainty the Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to uh configure the crew9 vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew n and then we really wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew 9 was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dana has anything to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do spacewalks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon space is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew n and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them uh for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy in a lot of ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better pricing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth changen from The New York Times oh hi hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that Bing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose have they've already written up 1.51 1.6 billion dollar are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with their space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra uh I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point uh on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about crosspace um seer's working very hard on their first maiden voyage of the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that dire Direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number of flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modification if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that it doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that it's performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently as I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time tagged events that in the flight software that they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do th use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they'll they'll have that uh ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure and uh we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yes hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one or two uccessful full crew rotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their cosns on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose Cosmos about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying cosmox to and from the space station with Starliner at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board involve not not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un crude and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ros Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing they have always maintained that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do with Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene clots at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance during of 1 and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's preparations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight test two have experienced Tire heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um see degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experienced a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the debert burn was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating And so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the the vehicle and then also the maneuverings required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular there is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime an orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dogghouse uh there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprised me to see uh one of the starboard a thrusters in that dogghouse fail off in the dobit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um the team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh this technique of using a a very simplified step sequence is minimized the changes required on Mission data loads uh they were going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say a unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the flight control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS flight control team the UN doc sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock dat and if it doesn't we need more simulations we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner on do and that's been very important for Dana and I next question is from Jeff fa from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon uh where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our un certainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um uh something that we've uh analyzed for contingency return with the crew uh on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the crews weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the dragon those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk change is and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more yeah thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some Thruster experts come in and and talked to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster U at a higher temperature at times than it was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dogghouse and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard doghouse that we we do not understand when an omac Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a Clos Loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at wh Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you didn't predict the downhill we really just couldn't get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close we were to a to a cliff in other words we've damaged the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on docking day and those were in a even though we were 200 M from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the deit burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation a number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the prance of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planned return date it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronauts traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this day and like to point out which we should be guess worried about the fact that they're still up there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about four months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount and we do that intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have margin um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have Butch and sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 31 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra males were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the crew and so so far our experience base and that of um the Cosmonaut experience space is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and in crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agent know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does we're interested in that from Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with eight months or or even up to a year and so far data suggests that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about two and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crews Health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after of2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system or if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dogghouse to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little bit more uh could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very difficult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accommodates Thruster firings in multiple directions so and then get the thermal right uh in that dogghouse and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way to do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there was some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh uh postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from nasaspaceflight.com hi thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um uh heading into the flight before the flight now what we're going to do is excute a small number the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking will drive a sequence of hooks they'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a SE sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of Step sequence in the past and other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the breakout sequences that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it's it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and bow socks I I think I heard Stitch say that that White Sands testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought Bowersox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that uh they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and it was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next Starliner flight so let me start with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was maybe a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at Whit s we we were excited and that was really a turning point in that we we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fired from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor aret rodine they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation in the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure mode a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual consensus across the panel we've talked about the voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that Starliner would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um uncrewed right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we PLL today the all the people that we asked from the senior um management of the different organizations um that are involved with human space flight um they all concurred that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on behalf of millions who share you know the same concern know given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all while receiving you know a few billion less than blowing so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the irrational was to have two options to ensure you know reliability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with spacex's ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly address anomalies you know everything they do so again just speaking on behalf of millions why does NASA continue to fund Boeing what is your question assoc associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew n next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well Boeing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to Boeing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission directorate and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight op operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incred inredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes are damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work than thanks jam and thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings so you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our mission safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another uh part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's Tak the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team has uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learned more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um ajet rocked uh the engine manufacturer the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA uh within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very diff difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner UNCW and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a SE sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight run review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an uncrewed test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh SE operation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the the crew8 vehicle one Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew eight vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet will go put in place so again um we'll get calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight Readiness review with flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this eight-month stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the create Dragon we'll probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew n vehicle arrives uh crew n with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover uh between the the crews and then we'll have create undock after that we will relocate the crew n vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy Ed crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soy's exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged uring Starliner returns safely now while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 mies above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they've seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exporation in moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities as evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with Butch and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew n Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew n Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and will provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they are finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded human space flight exploration thanks thanks Norm we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark stman CBS News uh this could be for Jim or Ken or Steve I I let you decide my question is about trust um I mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is ready to return astronauts home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with Boeing mean I'll startor I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to balance and and I think K said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess coner that you well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team uh restored and ready for the next issue and and I'll acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work at UH and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model now the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back uncrewed it needs to land at the wh sand space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the Nas and Boeing side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a de orbit burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so and Mark uh trust is a two-way street and it's built uh upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human ated vehicles I think uh you should understand the the trust is two ways Eric burer with ours Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and in your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starliner operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew Dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you uh your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Bing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the White Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simulations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the pop it on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused the degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed a bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other thrusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for Starliner one is H how do we avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer poet Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuvering engine the big 1500 PB Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Adent thrusters so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with AET um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months mons at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to find mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the Whit sand results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner um with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Mara D on the phone lines Mara Don from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 5050 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against in also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed the ability to either work crude or uncrewed um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimously we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplish ing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of a a situation of of loss and feeling like uh you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to uh finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission you've worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space f in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning Starliner safely but we have uh a crew eight uh mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew N9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa par from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this Brar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Starliner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will ever launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen fiser from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were Senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience influence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their management not to launch because of the cold weather and that information never got up and that was happening on the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they' inspect the the Orbiter and then as a matter of fact uh my commander Hoot Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would uh look like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever since has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room yep back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply state it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing day to day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off all the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with but andani that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ian Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon eban Brown Fox News for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh uh the technical and R&D review here that uh that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now uh to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I understand this is an oversight issue and it may come from something above the agency but uh your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues in commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fixed price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of Contracting Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got a uh a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spend so uh my answer you're you're posturing the question of what what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the cost uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question prends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from reuter thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly orberg say uh when you talk to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um it kind of broadly defined certification is coming after Starliner FES astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you guys are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far will NASA want to see Boeing fly an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certify Starliner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test Readiness review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we have not you know made a total determination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for two and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point so yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize is we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken Bowersox just I want to follow up on that that poll which you said was unanimous I wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was just part of that poll was it like 10 to zero 12 how how many votes were there thank you well uh so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the NASA engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo development uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the uh commercial crew program the uh engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Insurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got just about everybody I think did I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred with proceeding uncrewed and they stated where they might have one or two people uh during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there was a discussion on a previous call about if Starliner about Starliner returning un cruit if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission fa failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that stressed here by Steve stressed on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question uh I'd save and pose to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us in layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties due to the inability to predict with certainty that Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to uh configure the crew9 vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats as SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew 9 and then we really wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew 9 was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dana has anything to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do spacewalks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon spacecraft is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew N9 and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy in a lot of ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better pricing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth changen from The New York Times oh hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that Bing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose they've already written up 1.5 1.6 billion dollar are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with here space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra uh I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about Sierra space um Sierra's working very hard on their first maiden voyage of the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number of flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modifications if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that it doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that it's performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently is I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time tagged events that in the flight software they they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do th use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they'll they'll have that ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure and we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yes hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one or two successful full crew rotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their Cosmos on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose Cosmos about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying cosns to and from the space station with Starliner at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine um discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board involve not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un crude and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ross Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing vehicle they have always maintain that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do with Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene clots at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance during oft 1 and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's operations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight Test 2 have experienced higher heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um see degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experience a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the debert burn was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating and so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the vehicle and then also the maneuverings required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular there is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime an orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dog house uh there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprise me to see uh one of the starboard a thrusters in that dogghouse fail off in the deorbit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh this technique of using a a very simplified step sequence is minimized the changes required on Mission data loads uh they were going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say a unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the flight control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS flight control team the undock sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock dat and if it doesn't we need more simul we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner on do and that's been very important for Dana and I next question is from Jeff fa from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view uh the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon uh where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um uh we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um uh something that we've uh analyzed for contingency return with the crew uh on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the crews weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the dragon uh those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk changes and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months um for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some thruster experts come in and and talk to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster uh at a higher temperature at times than it was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dogghouse and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard doghouse that we we do not understand when an omac Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a Clos Loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at White Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you didn't predict the downhill we really just couldn't get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close we were to a to a cliff in other words we've damaged the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on docking day and those were in a even though we were 200 MERS from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the debert burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation a number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the perance of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planed return it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronauts traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this day and like to point out which we should be guess worried about the fact that they're still up there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about four months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount and we do that intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have margin um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have Butch and sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 31 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra males were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the crew and so so far our experience base and that of um The cosmina Experience base is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and in crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agency know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does we're interested in that from Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with eight months or or even up to a year and so far data suggest that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about 2 and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crews Health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after ofd 2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system or if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dogghouse to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little bit more uh could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very difficult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accom Ates Thruster firings in multiple directions so and then get the thermal right uh in that dogghouse and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way to do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there were some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh uh postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from NASA space flight.com hi thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um heading into the flight before the flight now what we're going to do is execute a a small number the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking we'll drive a sequence of hooks that'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a sep sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of Step sequence in the past and other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the breakout sequences that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it's it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and Bowers sock I I think I heard Stitch say that that White Sands testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought Bowersox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next Starliner flight so let me start with with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was it may be a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at White Sands we we were excited and that was really a turning point in that we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fired from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor airjet rodine they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation in the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure mode a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four-person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual consensus across the panel we've talked about the voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that starina would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um uncrewed right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner uh coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we PLL today the all the people that we asked from the senior um management of the different organizations um that are uh involved with human space flight um they all concur that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on behalf of millions who share you know the same concern given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all while receiving you know a few billion less than blowing so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the irrational was to have two options to ensure you know reliability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with spacex's ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly addressed anomalies you know Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics and the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well Boeing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention thatth they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety our core po value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to Boeing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission directorate and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jam and thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meeting meting so you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our missions safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another uh part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team has uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learned more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um ajet rocked uh the engine manufacturer uh the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA uh within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crud was very difficult for me personally uh we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner uncrewed and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test tonight um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight run review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an uncrewed test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the deal over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that veh vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the The Crew 8 vehicle when Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew8 vehicle will serve as the life boat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet we'll go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight read review with the flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who' stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so so this 8mon stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the create Dragon we'll probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew n vehicle arrives uh crew nine with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover uh between the the crews and then we'll have create undock after that we will relocate the crew n vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward report for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy use crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soyes exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station progr program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged uring star liner returns safely know while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 miles above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they' seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exploration and moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities as evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with but and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew N9 Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew n Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and will provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded human space flight exploration thanks thanks Norm we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we app appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark straussman CBS News uh this could be for Jim or Ken or Steve I I let you decide my question is about trust um I mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space Partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is right to return astronauts home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with Boe I mean I'll startor I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to balance and and I think Ken said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess caner St you well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team restored and ready for the next issue and and I'll acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work it uh and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model now we the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back uncrewed it needs to land at the white sand uh space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the Nas and Boeing side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a de burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so and Mark uh trust is a two-way street and it's built uh upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human rated vehicles I think uh you should understand the the trust is two ways Eric with ARs Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and and your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starliner operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you uh your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Boeing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the White Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simulations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the poppet on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused the degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed a bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other thrusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for uh Starliner one is H how do we a avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer popet Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some VAP vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuvering engine the big 1500 pound Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Adent thrusters so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with AET um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to find mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the white sand results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody body agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner U with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Marsha D on the phone lines Marsha D from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 5050 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against and also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed uh the ability to either work crude or uncrewed um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimously we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of a a situation of of loss and feeling like uh you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to uh finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission you've worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space plan in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning Starliner safely but we have a crew eight uh mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew N9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa par from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this Brar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you or for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Star liner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will ever launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen Fischer from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were a senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience in infuence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their man management not to launch because of the cold weather and that information never got up and that was happening on the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they' inspect the Orbiter and they as a matter of fact uh my commander Hoot Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would uh look like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever s has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room yep back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply state it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing day to day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off all the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with but insan that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ean Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon Ean Brown Fox News for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh uh the technical and R&D review here that uh that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I I understand this is an oversight issue and it may come from something above the agency but uh your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues in commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fixed price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of Contracting Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got a uh a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spend so uh my answer you're you're posturing the question of what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the ca uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question portends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from Reuters thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly ortberg say uh when you talk to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um a kind of broadly defined certification is coming after Starliner FES astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you guys are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far well NASA want to see Boeing fly an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certified Starliner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test Readiness review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we have not you know made a total Det mination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we've fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for two and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point so yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize is we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken Bowersox just I want to follow up on that that poll what you said was you unanimous I wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was as part of that poll was it like 10 to Z 12 how how many votes were there thank you well uh so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the NASA engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo devel velopment uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the uh commercial crew program the engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Insurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got just about everybody I think that I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred with proceeding UNCW and they stated where they might have one or two people uh during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there there was a discussion on a previous call about if Starliner about Starliner returning un cruit if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so I let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that stressed here by Steve stressed on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question uh I'd save and pose to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us in layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties due to the inability to predict with certainty that Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to configure the crew9 vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew 9 and then we really wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew 9 was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dana has anything to to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do space walks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon spacecraft is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew N9 and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them uh for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy in a lot of ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better pricing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth changen from The New York Times oh hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that Bing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose have they've already written up 1.5 1.6 billion dollars are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with here space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point uh on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about Sierra space um Sierra's working very hard on their first maiden voyage the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number of flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modifications if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that it doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that it's performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently as I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time tagged events that in the flight software they they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do those use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they'll they'll have that uh ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure here and uh we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yes hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one two successful full crew rotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their Cosmos on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose Cosmos about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying cosns to and from the space station with Starliner at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine um discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board would involve not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un crude and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ross Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing vehicle they have always maintained that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do with Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene clots at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance during of 1 and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's preparations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight test two have experienced higher heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um sea degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experienced a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the Deber burn was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating And so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the vehicle and then also the maneuvering required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular there is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime an orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dogghouse uh there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprise me to see uh one of the starboard AF thrusters in that dogghouse fail off in the dobit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um the team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh this technique of using a a very simplified step sequences minimize the changes required on Mission data loads uh they're going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say a unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the flight control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS flight control team the undock sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock dat and if it doesn't we need more simulations we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner on do and that's been very important for Dana and I next question is from Jeff F from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view uh the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon uh where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um uh something that we've uh analyzed for contingency return with the crew uh on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the cruise weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the dragon uh those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk change is and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months um for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more yeah thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some Thruster experts come in and and talked to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster U at a higher temperature at times than it was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dogghouse and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard dogghouse that we we do not understand when an omac Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a Clos Loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at Whit Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you predict the downhill we really just could get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close we were to a to a cliff in other words we've damage the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on Docking Day and were in a even though we were 200 met from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the debert burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation a number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the prance of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planned return date it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronom traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this day and like the point out which we should be guess worried about the fact that they're still up there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about four months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount and we do that intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have margin um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have butches sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 31 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra Mals were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the crew and so so far our experience base and that of um The cosmina Experience base is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and in crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agency know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does we're interested in that for Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with eight months or or even up to a year and so far data suggests that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about two and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crews Health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after ofd 2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dog house to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little bit more could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very difficult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accommodates Thruster firings in multiple directions so and then get the thermal right uh in that dogghouse and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way to do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there was some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh uh postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from nasaspaceflight.com hi thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um uh heading into the flight before the flight now now what we're going to do is execute a a small number the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking will drive a sequence of hooks they'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a SE sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of SE sequence in the past and other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the breakout sequences that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and Bower sucks I I think I heard Stitch say that that White Sands testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought bow Sox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that uh they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next carliner flight so let me start with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was maybe a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at Whit Sands we we were excited and that was really a turning point point in that we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fired from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor ajet rocked they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation and the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure mode a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four-person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual consensus across the panel we we've talked about voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that Starliner would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um uncrewed right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner uh coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we PLL today the all the people that we asked from the senior um management of the different organizations um that are uh involved with human space flight um they all concur that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on of millions who share you know the same concern know given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all while receiving you know a few billion less than Bo so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the irrational was to have two options to ensure you know reliability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with SpaceX is ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly address and you know Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics and the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well boing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a Test Flight By Nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the boing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to Boeing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission director and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complic fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurri came through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jam and thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our missions safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekend nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team is uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learn more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um AET rocked uh the engine manufacturer uh the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA uh within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and under understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner un crude and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh Tes um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight R review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an uncrewed test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de overt burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into to the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the the crew8 vehicle when Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew eight vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet will go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight read review with flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are six months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who' stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this eight-month stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the uh critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the St team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the create Dragon we'll probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner parts and before the crew 9 vehicle arrives uh crew 9 with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover uh between the the crews and then we'll have create undock after that we will relocate the crew n vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy Ed crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soyes exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged assuring Starliner returns safely know while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 Mi above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important convers ations they've asked questions they seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exploration and moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities is evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human Iration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with but and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew n Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew n Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and will provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they are finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded human space flight exploration thanks thanks Norm we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark stman CBS News uh this could be for Jim or Ken Steve I I let you decide my question is about trust um I mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space Partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is ready to return astronauts home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with boing I me I'll sorry I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to balance and and I think Ken said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess ker St well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team uh restored and ready for the next issue and and I'll acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work it uh and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model now we the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back un crw it needs to land at the Whit sand uh space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the NASA and Boeing side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a over it burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did and Mark uh trust is a two-way street and it's built uh Upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human rated vehicles I think uh you should understand the the trust is two ways with ARs Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and and your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starliner operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew Dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Boeing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the White Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simulations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the poppet on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused to degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed a bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other thrusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for uh Starliner one is H how do we a avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer pop it Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuvering engine the big 1500 PB Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Adent thrusters so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with a jet um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the wh Sand's results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner U with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Mara Don on the phone lines Marsha Don from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 5050 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against and also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed the ability to either work crude or uncrewed um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimously we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of a a situation of of loss and feeling like uh you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to uh finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission you've worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space plan in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning Starliner safely but we have uh a crew8 uh mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa par from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this bruar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you or for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Starliner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will ever launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen fiser from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were a senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience influence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics uh going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their management not to launch because of the coal weather and that information never got up and that was happening on the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they'd inspect the Orbiter and they' as a matter of fact uh my commander Hood Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would uh looked like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever since has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room yep back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply stated it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing day to day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off all the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with but and that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for that what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ian Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon Ean brown fox news for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh uh the technical and R&D review here that that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I I understand this is an oversight issue and it come from something above the agency but your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues in commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fixed price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of Contracting Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got got a uh a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spend so uh my answer your your posturing the question of what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the cost uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question pends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from Reuters thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly ortberg say uh when you talked to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um a kind of broadly defined certification is coming after Starliner FES astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you guys are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far will NASA want to see Boeing fly an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certifi Starliner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test redin review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we have not you know made a total determination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for two and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point so yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize as we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken Bowersox just I want to follow up on that that poll which you said was unanimous I wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was as part of that poll was it like 10 to zero 12 how how many votes were there thank you well uh so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the nasan engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo development uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the commercial crew program the engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Insurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall uh JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got just about everybody I think that I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred with proceeding uncrewed and they stated where they might have one or two people during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there was a discussion on a previous call about if Starliner about Starliner returning un cruit if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission fa failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so I let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that stressed here by Steve stressed on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question uh I save and POs to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us and layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties due to the inability to predict with certainty that Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to uh configure the crew 9 vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew 9 and then we really want wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew 9 was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dan has anything to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do space walks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon spacecraft is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew n and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them uh for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy in a lot of ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better pricing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth changen from The New York Times oh hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that boing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose they've already written up 1.5 1.6 billion dollar are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with here space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra uh I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about Sierra space um Sierra's working very hard on their first maid Voyage of the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number of flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modifications if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that is performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently as I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time tagged events the in the flight software they they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do th use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they'll they'll have that uh ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure and uh we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yeah hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one or two successful full crew rotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their Cosmos on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose Cosmos about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying Kuts to and from the space station with Starliner at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine um discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board involve not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un crude and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ross Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing vehicle they have always maintained that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do a Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene clots at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance of 1 and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's preparations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight test two have experienced higher heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um SE degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experienced a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the deorbit burn was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating And so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the vehicle and then also the maneuvering required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular there is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime an orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dogghouse uh there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprise me to see uh one of the starboard a thrusters in in that dogghouse fail off in the dobit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um the team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh thisch technique of using a a very simplified step sequence is minimize the changes required on Mission data loads uh they're going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uh uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say a unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the flight control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS collect control team the undock sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock dat and if it doesn't we need more simulations we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner on Doc and that's been very important for Dana and I next question is from Jeff fa from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view uh the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon uh where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um uh we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um uh something that we've uh analyzed for contingency return with the crew uh on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the crews weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the drag and uh those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk change is and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months um for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more yeah thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some Thruster experts come in and and talk to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster U at a higher temperature at times than it was was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dog house and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard dogghouse that we we do not understand when an OM Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a Clos Loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at White Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you didn't predict the downhill we really just couldn't get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close was were to a to a cliff in other words we've damaged the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on docking day and those were in a even though we were 200 meters from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the deit burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation a number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the propon of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planned return date it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronauts traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this stay and like to point out which we should be guess worried about the fact that they're still out there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about four months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount and we do that in intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have margin um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have Butch and sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above of that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 31 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra Mals were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the crew and so so far our experience base and that of um the Cosmonaut experience base is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and in crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agency know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does were interested in that from Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with eight months or or even up to a year and so far data suggests that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about two and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crews health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after ofd 2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system or if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dogghouse to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little a little bit more uh could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very difficult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accommodates Thruster firings in multiple directions so and then get the thermal right uh in that dogghouse and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there was some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh a postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from nasaspaceflight.com I thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um uh heading into the flight before the flight now what we're going to do is execute a a small number the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking we'll drive a sequence of hooks they'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a SE sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of SE sequence in the past in other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the breakout sequences that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it's it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant it was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and Bowers Sox I I think I heard Stitch say that that white Sand's testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought B Sox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that uh they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next Starliner flight so let me start with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was maybe a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at wh Sands we we were excited and that was really a turning point in that we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fired from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor airjet rodine they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation in the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure remote a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four-person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual con ensus across the panel we've talked about the voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that Starliner would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um uncrewed right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner uh coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we polled today the all the people that we asked from the senior management of the different organizations um that are involved with human space flight um they all concur that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on behalf of millions who share you know the same concern know given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all all receiving you know a few billion less than blowing so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the rationale was to have two options to ensure you know reliability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with SpaceX is ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly address anomalies you know Jim free associate administrator for space operation Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew n next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to First further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well boing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to both for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission directorate and our agency level processes that includes the the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jamman thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our missions safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an inedible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team is uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedic ation resilience as they learned more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um AET rocked uh the engine manufacturer uh the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner UNCW and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight Rance review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an UNCW test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the the crew8 vehicle once Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew8 vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet will go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight Readiness review with flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who've stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this 8mon stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the crew8 dragon we'll probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew n vehicle arrives uh crew n with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover between the the crews and then we'll have crew8 undock after that we will relocate the crew N9 vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy use crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soy's exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer are getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the team team on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged assuring Starliner returns safely know while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 Mi of above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they've seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exploration and moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities as evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with Butch and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew n Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew n Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and will provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they are finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded human space flight exploration thanks thanks Norm we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark St CBS News uh this could be for Jim or Ken or Steve I I let you decide my question is about trust um mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space Partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is ready to return astronauts home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with Boeing I mean I'll start I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to balance and and I think Ken said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess caner St well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team uh restored and ready for the next issue and and all acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work it uh and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model model now the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back uncrewed it needs to land at the wh sand uh space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the Nas and Boeing side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a orbit burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so and Mark uh trust is a two-way street and it's built uh upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human rated vehicles I think uh you should understand the the trust is two ways Eric burer with ARs Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and in your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starling operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew Dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Boeing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the White Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simulations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the poppet on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused the degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other thrusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for uh Starliner one is H how do we a avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer popet Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuver engine the big 1500lb Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Adent thrusters so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with a jet um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to find mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the Whit s results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it uh with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner uh with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Mara Don on the phone lines Marsha Don from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 5050 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against and also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed the ability to either work crude or UNR RW um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimously we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of a a situation of of loss and feeling like uh you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission you've worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space plan in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning Starliner safely but we have uh a crew eight uh mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew N9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa par from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this Brar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you or for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Starliner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will ever launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were a senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience influence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their management not to launch because of the cold weather and that information never got up and that was happening the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they'd inspect the Orbiter and they as a matter of fact uh my commander hot Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would looked like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever since has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room y back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply state it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing day to day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off I'll the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with but and that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ian Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon Ean Brown Fox News for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh the technical and R&D review here that that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now uh to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I understand this is an oversight issue and it may come from something above the agency but uh your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues in commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fixed price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of Contracting Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got a uh a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spend so uh my answer you're you're posturing the question of what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the cost uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question pretends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from Reuters thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly orberg say uh when you talked to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um it kind of broadly defines certification is coming after Starliner FES astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you guys are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far will NASA want to see Boeing fly an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certify Starliner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test Readiness review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we we have not you know made a total determination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we've fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for two and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize is we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken bow just I want to follow up on that that poll which you said was unanimous I wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was as part of that poll was it like 10 to zero 12 how how many votes were there thank you well uh so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the NASA engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo development uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the uh commercial crew program the engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Assurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got just about everybody I think did I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred uh with proceeding uncrewed and they stated where they might have have one or two people during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there was a discussion on a previous call about if Starliner about Starliner returning un cruit if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission fa failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so I let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that stressed here by Steve stressed on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question uh I'd save and pose to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us in layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties due to the inability to predict with certainty that Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to uh configure the crew9 vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew nine and then we really wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew 9 was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dana has anything to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do space walks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon spacecraft is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less train training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew n and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them uh for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy and a ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better pricing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth Chang from The New York Times oh hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that Bing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose they've already written up 1.51 1.6 billion doar are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with here space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra uh I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point uh on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about Sierra space um Sierra's working very hard on their first maiden voyage of the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number of flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modifications if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that it doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that it's performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently as I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time taged the vents the in the flight software that they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do th use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they'll they'll have that uh ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure and uh we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yes hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one or two successful full crew rotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their cmuts on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose OS about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying cosm Nots to and from the space station with Starlin at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board involve not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un cruded and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ross Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing vehicle they have always maintained that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do with Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene clots at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance during oft 1 and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's preparations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight test two have experienced higher heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um see degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experienced a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the deorbit burn was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating And so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the vehicle and then also the maneuvering required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular There is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime an orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dogghouse uh there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprise me to see uh one of the starboard a thrusters in that dogghouse fail off in the durit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher Heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um the team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh this technique of using a a very simplified step sequence is minimize the changes required on Mission data loads uh they were going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uh uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say uh unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the flight control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS flight control team the undock sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock date and if it doesn't we need more simulations we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner on do and that's been very important for Dana I next question is from Jeff fa from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view uh the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon uh where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um something that we've analyzed for contingency return with the crew uh on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the crews weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the dragon uh those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk change is and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months um for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more yeah thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some Thruster experts come in and and talked to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster U at a higher temperature at times than it was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more care y um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dogghouse and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard dogghouse that we we do not understand when an omac Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a closed loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at Whit Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you didn't predict the downhill we really just couldn't get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close we were to a to a cliff in other words we've damaged the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on docking day and those were in a even though we were 200 meters from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the deit burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation a number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the propon of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planned return date it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronauts traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this day and like to point out which we should be I guess worried about the fact that they're still up there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about four months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount and we do that intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have Mar um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have Butch and sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 3 1 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra Mals were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the C and so so far our experience base and that of um The cosmina Experience base is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and in crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agency know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does we're interested in that from Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with eight months or or even up to a year and so far data suggest that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about two and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crew's Health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after ofd 2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system or if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dogghouse to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little bit more uh could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very ult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accommodates Thruster firings in multiple Direction so and then get the thermal right uh in that dogghouse and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way to do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there was some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh uh postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then we also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from NASA space s.com hi thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um uh heading into the flight before the flight now what we're going to do is execute a a small number the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking we'll drive a sequence of hooks they'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a SE sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of Step sequence in the past in other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the breakout sequences that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it's it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and Bower sucks I I think I heard Stitch say that that White Sands testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought power Sox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that uh they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next Starliner flight so let me start with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was may be a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at Whit Sands we we were excited and that was really a turning point in that we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fire from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor airjet rodine they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation and the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure mode a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four-person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual consensus across the panel we've talked about voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that star would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um uncrewed right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner uh coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we poll today the all the people that we asked from the senior um management of the different organizations um that are uh involved with human space flight um they all concur that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on behalf of millions who share you know the same concern know given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all all receiving you know a few billion less than blowing so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the irrational was to have two options to ensure you know reliability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with spacex's ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly address anomalies you know Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operations director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the queue but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design Improvement so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well Boeing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep w and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and tooing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission director and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operation mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here here will learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jamman thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our missions safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another uh part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following our progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it is just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures we'll see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point um very proud of the due diligence that the team has uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learned more and we got more data and different results at time times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team um airjet rocked uh the engine manufacturer uh the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit Sands test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um determining the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner un crude and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight Rance review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an un test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll will'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the the crew8 vehicle when Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew8 vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet we'll go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight read review with a flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undock sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for 8 months I think most of you know our normal Expedition durations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who've stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this eight Monon stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple spacewalk walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the create Dragon we'll probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew n vehicle arrives uh crew 9 with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal Handover between the the crews and then we'll have create undock after that we will relocate the crew n vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy used crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that soy's exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critic iCal and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home UNCW the ground teams will still be fully engaged assuring Starliner return safely now while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 Mi above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they've seamlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of expiration and moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities is evidence by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with but and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be remiss not to mention that this decision also affects the crew n Mission and the astronauts that are assigned to fly in that mission uh in September crew nine Mission will now configure Dragon for two crew members and we provide seats for Butch and sunny to return we're also working to finalize those crew assignments and update the training plan those decisions will may be made public once they are finalized I would again like to thank all the teams who have designed built and now fly Starliner going forward their hard work will continue to pave the path for expanded uh human space flight exploration thanks thanks nor we'll move into the question and answer portion now um we'll open it up again to folks in the room and folks on the phone if you're on the phone press star one to get into the queue please clearly state which of our participants you are addressing in your question and we appreciate you limiting yourself to one question um so with that yeah in the back Mark stman CBS News uh this could be for Jim or Ken or Steve I I I'll let you decide my question is about trust um I mean space flight is a business that's built on trust you trust that everyone's going to do their job you have to have trust in all your space Partners Boeing essentially said trust us we have a spacecraft that is ready to return astronauts home and NASA went in a different direction so how now do you begin to rebuild that relationship of trust with Boeing I mean I'll sorry I don't I don't think it's a trust issue at all I don't think we're we're rebuilding trust I think we're looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that's there differently than Boeing does it's not a matter of trust it's our technical expertise and our experience that we have to to balance and and I think Ken said it we balance risk across everything not just the Starliner piece so I I don't see it as a trust issue at all I guess caner you well I would say that um we've had a lot of tense discussions right because the the call was close and so people have emotional uh investment in in either option and and that gives you a a a a healthy discourse um but after that you have to do some work to to keep your team together right to keep uh your team uh restored and ready for the next issue and and I'll acknowledge that we have some work to do there um it's pretty natural whenever you've had a a difficult decision to make um but we're aware of it and and we'll work it uh and we're committed to continuing to work with with Boeing uh Steve any anything you want to add yeah I wouldn't necessarily call it trust I would call it a technical disagreement where we get uh a group of Engineers together and they disagree on the risk level of what could potentially happen to the thrusters um Boeing did a great job building a model now the question is is that model good enough to predict performance for a crew um all the work we've done is really important also for bringing this vehicle back we want the vehicle to come back uncrewed it needs to land at the wh sand uh space Harbor which is where the opportunities are setting up in September and all the work that we've done both on the nass and Boeing side give us confidence to bring the vehicle back it has to execute a deit burn it has to do all the things we need it to do undocking from the space station safely so I think together we have worked toward that that part there was just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk and that's kind of where it got down to and I would say you know it it's close it's very close and it just depends on you know how you evaluate the risk we did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so and Mark uh trust is a two-way street and it's built uh upon a relationship and I think uh as indicated just an hour ago by the new CEO of Boeing that they intend to move forward and fly Starliner in the future which is very important to NASA that we have two uh human rated vehicles I think uh you should understand the the trust is two ways Eric with ours Technica uh two questions uh one for the administrator just to follow up on that question about Boeing and in your discussion with the Boeing CEO Kelly orberg how do you anticipate that NASA can help Boeing get Starliner operational missions could you maybe fly like a cargo mission to support that or just curious what your thoughts are on that and then for I think Ken Bowers Soxs curious when did you think it was likely that crew Dragon would be the vehicle to bring the crew home Butch and sunny from the outside it does seem like that you saw something perhaps in the White Sands test data that gave you concern it certainly seemed like that's when the the odds seem to shift toward Dragon would love any insights on that thank you uh your question to me is best answered by the people that are going to determine the specific uh testing and what is required before the crew would fly yeah I I can take a cut at that Eric um so we're going to sit down with Boeing and kind of lay out what what's that path right I I would say the wh Sands testing uh did give us a surprise uh we saw in that testing as we did you know we did five total simul ations with that Thruster of a downhill uh deorbit burn sequence and so that's when we saw this swelling of the poppet on the oxidizer side in other words a piece of Teflon that swells up and it it gets in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the Thruster the way it needs to go into and that's what caused the degradation and thrust when we saw that I think that's when things changed a bit for us in that now we know that's prevalent and where is it prevalent in other rusters and then what could that swelling do in the future so that's I think where we change course what we have to do now moving forward uh for uh Starliner one is H how do we a avoid firing that Thruster in a manner that would cause the heating that causes that oxidizer poet Teflon piece to swell can we figure out how to do that with some testing um and can we also we also have learned recently that the environment in the dogghouse and and I think I've talked about this is hotter than we thought in other words there are when the other thrusters fire in a dogghouse some of that heat soaks back into uh an individual Thruster and that causes the Teflon to swell it also causes some vaporization of the propellant so is there a way we can figure out how to get the dogghouse cooler overall and then thirdly we see cross talk when the sometimes when an omac the orbital maneuvering engine the big 1500 lb Thruster fires it then causes heat on one of the Thruster so we've got to sit down and go through all those details with Boeing with AET um the teams have been so focused uh over the last couple months at understanding uh the the physics and what's going on which we have a much better understanding of that now now that we have that understanding of the physics I think we can move forward and start to find mitigations for future flights see if Ken has anything to add well um for me the uh the white sand results I thought were a gift it was just great to have that data um and I really thought it might help us convert I've seen it with a few of our discussions where uh we have people in different camps on a on a risk decision We Gather more data and then a piece of data comes in and we we come together and everybody agrees that we we take one path or the other uh and I I thought we might get there until probably about a week ago I'd say that that that's where it started looking like hey I I just don't think we'll get there in time uh for uh for bringing Starliner home in a in a timely manner um with more time we might have gotten a lot smarter uh but but we're just at the point where we need to bring Starliner home take all the data we can and and keep moving forward I think next question is from Marsha Don on the phone lines Mara Don from Associated Press yes hi um for you Ken I'm I'd like a little more um information on how the opinions were split um was it 50 50 75 to 25% in favor of SpaceX if you could just characterize the numbers for and against and also if you could discuss the mood in the room today thank you um so um the the uh the polling uh was unanimous amongst all the NASA folks um Boeing expressed the ability to either work crud or uncrewed um they believe in their vehicle and and and they'd be willing to bring a crew home on it um we had some NASA folks that uh took a broader view of the um of the the global risks who who thought that hey we probably should keep the crew on the uh on the the test flight um to to say whether that was 15 20% of the people i' I'd have a hard time uh coming up with that number but as far as the mood um all of us really wanted to complete the the test flight with crew and I think uh unanimous ly we're disappointed not to be able to do that um but that's part of the reason our system is set up the way it is right you don't want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision and so on purpose our system increases the volume on some of our voices from the technical authorities folks that are asked not to think about uh those emotions uh and and it helps to pull you away from the fact that you might be disappointed in a certain decision uh and then guide you towards that final outcome and and I would add on the mood in the room you know I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do and even for myself personally that that is a hard thing to go through it's a little bit of a a situation of of loss and feeling like uh you lost something and we haven't in the ultimate long-term view we have not lost anything because Boeing as the administrator Nelson said is committed to uh finding the solutions and flying Starliner again but I probably can't express in words what it's like when you commit to a mission you've worked on a mission so long and then we make a fairly dramatic change which which we have not done um in human space plan in a long time and so there's a feeling of loss uh and we'll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here because we need this team to focus uh not only on returning starliners say saely but we have a crew 8 mission to return and reconfigure we have a crew 9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things we have a really busy time frame and we'll do that we'll talk to the team and and make sure they understand that it's nobody's fault and it's a normal feeling to have this feeling of of loss or that you didn't complete what you uh intended to do okay we'll take the next question also from the phone lines from Marissa from NBC News hi everyone thanks so much for doing this Brar with NBC here Senator Nelson this could be for you or for anyone else who wants to join in um we heard a mention of a next space flight for Starliner a couple of times and we know how much uh NASA would like to have an alternative to SpaceX more companies available to provide the ability to shuttle astronauts to the ISS Senator Nelson how certain are you that Boeing will launch Starliner with a crew on board again 100% 100% correct there is no shadow of a doubt in your mind can you explain why uh because of what this uh panel has already told you uh the extensive Cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home and uh a certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and uh Boeing's willingness to carry through on this program all right next question from the phones Kristen Fischer from CNN uh thank you my question is also for Senator Nelson Senator uh you were a member of the Congressional committee that investigated the Challenger accident you were a senator when Colombia happened how much did that experience influence your personal decision today thank you well very much um it has affected the decision today by this Collective group and all of those that participated in the flight test Readiness review this morning uh it is a trying to turn around the culture that first led to the loss of Challenger and then led to the loss of Colombia where obvious mistakes were not being brought forth for example uh give you uh specifics going back to the loss of Challenger even the engineers in Utah in Morton thol were begging their management not to launch because of the cold weather and that information never got up and that was happening on the very night before the launch the next morning another example on Colombia uh astronauts would get through with their flights and they'd inspect the Orbiter and they as a matter of fact uh my commander Hoot Gibson said it he he'd look at subsequent flights and he would uh look like that a shotgun had been shot on the delicate silicon tiles because of so much of the foam shedding off of the external tank uh but there was a culture that did not bring that information up to the decision makers so NASA ever since has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind and I think uh right today is is a good example of that do we have other questions in the room y back left good morning Cheryl Mercedes here with kou here in Houston Texas any of you can answer this question just really simply state it to the folks at home who have no idea what these two astronauts are experiencing uh right now up in orbit um all they're hearing is the technical stuff and what we're reporting uh what do you have to say to those folks who are saying man these guys simply are going to miss out on the holidays with their families at home what's it like for them up there what are they experiencing dayt day now with this decision and this news that it will now be months before they return thank you I'll I'll jump in on on this one um first off all the astronauts on station are professionals all those qualities I talked about with Butch and that's exemplified in in every astronaut that flies to the International Space Station they're professionals when they launch they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year so mentally you know you know that you could be in that situation now once you're in the arena obviously it's a little different it's challenging um you know it's disappointing that uh that they're not coming home on Starliner but that's okay it's a test flight that's what we do they knew those risks going in and but we keep them very busy there's a lot of science and research going on on the International Space Station that Dana can elaborate on and has elaborated on uh we keep them busy we keep them working and they are continuing to pave the road for human exploration going forward so it's great they're part of the crew um and they're doing fine what do you say to their families I care deeply about their families I know this is a huge impact um to their families and it means a lot um their families are the pillars that keep them strong they're the pillars that we at Nasa depend on for the workforce to keep us going uh they're the pillars that help this team uh with the crude flight test have the resilience to keep going especially over these last two months that that were needed to go forward and that's both at Nasa and Boeing so family is the backbone of what we do in the support structure so I tell their families thank you um thank you for their support thank you for what they do to allow NASA and our commercial Partners to do what we do to explore space we're going to go back to the phone lines next is Ian Brown from Fox News hi good afternoon eban Brown Fox News for administrator Nelson sir um I I can appreciate all the uh uh the technical and R&D review here that uh that's being detailed for us and and the the investment everyone has in this but I'd like to ask you about the investment we as taxpayers have given to Boeing over I think it's at least 15 years now uh to the it's been hundreds of millions from seed money to to selecting them as providers for commercial crew at what point and I I understand this is an oversight issue and it may come from something above the agency but uh your career has spanned both the agency and above the agency and I want to know how or when uh or what's the process for reviewing this contract to determine we're not we're not getting what we paid for as taxpayers um I I say this as uh knowing that there is a public sentiment that is very skeptical of Boeing as a corporation right now not just due to this but also due to their other issues in commercial Aviation um so I'd like to know when those discussions happen and and how they happen and and what gets discussed to specifically answer your question you remember when we started the commercial program one of the advantages of the commercial program was that it was going to be a fixed price contract uh so much of NASA's research and development on in a very unforgiving environment space that is very hard and is Cutting Edge technology and it is very expensive and as a result on the normal way of contract Cost Plus it will run the cost way up not so with the commercial crew program and that was part of the negotiation for both of the companies Boeing and SpaceX and they've got a uh a fixed price and if you uh check the record you can find out how much additional Boeing has had to to spent so uh my answer you're you're posturing the question of what I would answer in front of a congressional committee about the cost uh is that this program is working like it should now if your question prends something else then speak it but I think that's what you were getting at okay we'll go to Joey roulette from Reuters thanks uh for Bill Nelson did Kelly ortberg say uh when you talk to him whether Boeing would pay for an additional test mission before Starliner gets certified and um for Steve or or Ken I'm reading some contract language from Boeing's most recent uh modification that says um it kind of broadly defined certification that's coming after Starliner flies astronauts to and from the ISS and so I know there's a lot of data that you guys are going to get on the return leg but since it's coming back empty and based on what we've seen so far will naso want to see Boeing fly an additional test mission before it gets its certification or might NASA change those requirements and certify Starliner anyway uh Joey uh it did not come up nor would it have been appropriate for in a conversation of which I'm alerting him as to what the decision of the flight test read in review was that we would get into those matters yeah yeah we've we've started looking at the flight test objectives what we have already accomplished on this flight and what's remaining we we have not you know made a total determination yet of what objectives are um in front of us or or what we've fulfilled we'll take a little time to do that um you know I I don't think we have decided on the path yet of another crude flight test we have gotten a lot out of this vehicle so far it's been on orbit now for 2 and a half months which we didn't intend so we've got a lot of data out of that we'll have to sit down and and talk about the certification aspects after the flight it's a little premature to do that at this point so yeah we need to get the vehicle back on the ground and then analyze the data and be driven by that in our next decision uh but I wouldn't rule anything out right I mean there's we have we have options for how we move forward um the one thing I I do want to emphasize is we plan to work together with Boeing to find that path next we have Chris Davenport from The Washington Post hi thanks so much um I guess for Ken Bowersox just I want to follow up on that that poll which you said was unanimous I wonder if you can give us a number of votes cast that that was as part of that poll was it like 10 to zero 12 how how many votes were there thank you well the so I I'll kind of go through just mentally all the orgs we pulled um we unofficially uh asked the opinion of the NASA engineering NASA engineering and Safety Center the flight operations directorate uh the division director for ISS and uh commercial Leo development uh at uh NASA headquarters the ISS program the uh commercial crew program the engineering technical Authority uh the uh crew health and medical technical Authority safety Mission Assurance technical Authority um let's see who else did I leave out all the center directors from stennis Marshall uh JSC um and Kennedy Space Center where the commercial crew program is officially based um anybody I missed on that list I think you got just about everybody yeah I think did I get everybody and that was and that was again all everybody concurred uh with proceeding uncrewed and they stated where they might have one or two people uh during our meeting uh that uh that had a different opinion and tried to give those folks an opportunity to talk to the group we'll go to Micah maidenberg from Wall Street Journal thank you uh for administrator Nelson and Jim free uh there was a discussion on a previous call about if Starliner about Starliner returning un crude if that would count as a loss of mission or Mission failure um what is your view on that and if you don't agree that it would be a loss of mission or Mission fa failure could you could you please explain why thanks uh yeah Mike I think we we uh so I let me go back to Echo something Steve said we've accomplished a lot on this Mission and learned a lot about this vehicle satisfied a lot of the objectives already um that stressed here by Steve dressed on previous press conferences we we'll look at this as we do any of our missions to see do does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we Define uh as a mishap once we get the vehicle back back um that that's our time to look at that so I think that's a question I'd save and pose to us on the other side of of getting the vehicle back we'll go to Izzy Alvarez from ABC thank you can you please tell us in layman terms why NASA chose SpaceX to bring sunny and Butch home how did you come to that decision I can take a cut at that and we'll we'll see um uh you know when we looked at first of all we looked at the risk of uh putting Butch and sunny on the Starliner vehicle due to the issues with the thrusters that we've talked about and so when we looked at that risk we said that that risk was due to the uncertainties DU to the inability to predict with certainty the Thruster performance for the rest of the mission including holding the orientation of the vehicle for the deorbit burn and then maneuvering the vehicle for the separation of the crew module um and the service module when we came to that conclusion we started looking at what other options Dana and I both did what options do we have because these missions are really jointly shared between the ISS program and Commercial crew program and as we started looking at various options it was obvious to both of us that the easiest and best option was to uh configure the crew n vehicle uh with a couple empty seats uh on the way uphill to put ballast in those seats SpaceX had that capability um we also knew that we had um a space suit on orbit already that we could utilize for one of the crew members they've tried that on and that space suit Works uh both crew members tried on a space suit so we have a space suit now we're going to launch for one of the other crew members on crew n and then we really wanted to give the crew you know a suited return like we always have in US space flight so when we started to weigh all those options it became very obvious that crew was the best option fly up two empty seats have Butch and sunny join uh the increment crew and return on crew n that just became the easiest the best option and the most efficient option for all of us and I'll see if Dana has anything to add yeah I would just add that um you know knowing that this was a test flight we made the decision a couple years ago to uh train and keep Butch and sunny current with all aspects of station some of the most complex things we do space walks robotics some of the research so um we had them trained they've obviously flown to station before they've done long duration missions both of them have and so again when you line that up with our vehicle options and the fact that the dragon spacecraft is highly automated um as you all know we've used it for private astronaut missions we do have a lot of experience taking uh people with much less training than what our classic training is for our NASA crew and having them fly on dragons and so when you look at that in aggregate it made a lot of sense to make the decision to adjust crew n and have them do a full Expedition and come home on a dragon and and one thing I'd like to add um a major goal of the commercial crew program is to develop um not just the capability to go back and forth to space station but a generic capability to go back and forth to low earth orbit to develop a commercial capability um there's two reasons for that one is dissimilar redundancy so you have this option where if there's a problem on one vehicle um you might not have the same problem on another vehicle so so you could use them uh for a return or or or perhaps keep them flying while another vehicle is working through um recovery from some sort of a problem um but it's also to provide some competition uh in the environment uh and and competition is healthy in a lot of ways it uh causes you to develop your technology it causes you to get better price ing uh and and we would like to have that competition in the future uh so that's that's why we have more than one provider we're trying to develop next question is from Kenneth changen from The New York Times oh hi thank you um this is I guess is for administrator Nelson uh you express confidence that boing will continue but it's also a first price contract so potentially they could lose have they've already written up 1.5 1.6 billion dollar are you saying that you're confident that they will continue to write off money losing money on this and I guess the second question is has there been any discussion with here space uh about um converting Dreamchaser for crew thank you on Sierra uh I will let somebody else uh answer that uh with regard to Boeing uh remember it's a fixed price contract uh we expect delivery on the contract and therefore uh there is no discussion at this point uh on NASA's part uh in the question that you pose which is basically that they've spent X will they spend y to get to where uh Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation that's not uh I don't have the answer to that nor do I think we would have the answer now and I'll I'll add about Sierra space um Sierra's working very hard on their first maiden voyage of the Dreamchaser that's a cargo Mission um they've got the vehicle down at Kennedy and they're working through test and final assembly so it's it's the plan that they fly cargo missions to station through the rest of station and in fact that's the scope of the contract that we have with them to provide cargo capabilities there is no existing contract with the agency for crude capability which doesn't mean that that's not a possibility somewhere in the future in fact Sierra has their own goals about moving in that direction in the future but for now the work and the focus is on getting them flying as a as a cargo flight and if you look back to how we started um SpaceX and the dragons that's a very similar approach we started with cargo flights first we flew a number flights and then they eventually evolved into the crude version of the Dragon next question is from Lauren grush from Bloomberg hi thank you so much I'm wondering can you walk us through what mod modifications if any will be made to Starliner ahead of its return now that it doesn't have a crew on board and will NASA be flying that return any differently or watching for anything specifically now that it's not now that it's performing this return without a crew thanks uh I'll I'll take the question relative to the the reconfiguration of Starliner there's a few things that we have to do differently as I I said earlier we're going to modify the separation sequence a little bit to to get away from the space station a little quicker than we had planned so that's one modification uh that will be done via ground commanding and then the there'll be some time tagged events that in the flight software that they'll execute there are a few items in the cockpit that have to be configured a little differently obviously if you had a crew on board some of the life support systems will be configured just like we did on the orbit flight Test 2 mission in 2022 we'll do those use those same configurations uh obviously we've got to do a little bit of planning relative to the center of gravity uh without the crew members being in the in the seats so we've looked at that already and that doesn't appear to be a big problem um so we've got a few things like that to go work on the teams have been really laying out all that data um the ground the ground teams will have a little bit different set of uh flight rules to operate from so so we'll uh they they'll have that uh ahead of them but there's a few minor things to the spacecraft to reconfigure and uh we're already in the process of of starting that work next question is from Will Robinson Smith from space flight now yes hi thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today um question I believe for uh Dana Wile or perhaps uh Steve Stitch um in one of the previous briefings it was discussed that I think the Russians wanted to see it was one or two successful full cotation missions of Starliner before they would put one of their Cosmos on the spacecraft um has the agency had the opportunity to talk to uh Rose Cosmos about the path forward and um you know what the the options will be for flying cosns to and from the space station with Starliner at this point Thank you sure our focus with all the uh International Partners as you can imagine discussions about what's happening on board or changing launches or operations on board involve not just our NASA team but the entire International partnership and so similar to the discussions you've heard today the focus has been on the decision immediately in front of us with what to do with Starliner crude or un crude and in fact when we ended the uh review today I sent an email out to all of the the program managers across the International partnership so they understood the the decision so they've been following along with us um in terms of Ross Cosmos thinking about um our integrated crew exchanges and flying on the the Boeing vehicle they have always maintain that they want to see a few successful flights before they fly crew on it I don't expect that that'll change but we're not we're not actively having those discussions right now right now we're focused on what to do a Starliner but of course those are things we'll talk about in the future next question from Irene cloths at Aviation week thanks very much um I think this is for Steve um as far as the uh the the Thruster issues um considering the return of the spacecraft and the performance during of one and two is the primary concern now that because there was the overheating during the approach to station that there's some uncertainty on how these thrusters are now going to perform um during the deorbit and uh can you also just give us an update on what the status is on Boeing's preparations to return Starliner without crew and uh what um if any additional risks to the spacecraft are and granted those are far below risks to crew but if there are any additional discs at this point in bringing Starliner back uncrewed since that's not the um nominal plan thanks yeah good good questions Irene uh what I would say is the the thrusters uh on this flight relative to orbit flight Test 2 have experienced higher heating we had more thrusters fail off more thrusters um see degradation in fact you know one of them uh failed off and we haven't hot fired that we did two docked hot Fires at ISS and we've chosen not to utilize that Thruster at all but they've experienced a little more stress I would say than the previous flight even though the deorbit burn was was successful on oft uh the first orbit flight test and the second one these thrusters have experienced more stress more Heating And so there's there's a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn holding the orientation of the vehicle and then also the maneuverings required after that we've also learned uh in the starboard dogghouse in particular there is extra heating that we have just discovered in the last two weeks and looking at the data a little more closely anytime and orbital maneuvering Thruster fires in that dogghouse there's there's higher Heating and so we had one Thruster on of2 uh in 2022 fail off after the deorbit burn um we it would not surprise me to see uh one of the starboard a thrusters in that dogghouse fail off in the dobit burn for this flight so I would say a little higher heating a little bit more thermal and a little more uncertainty now that we understand the physics a little bit better for crew return um in terms of the preps of the vehicle um you know we've been getting uh the vehicle prepared um the team is on the ground really has gone through and looked at um uh the flight software that's that's on board is there any changes that need to be made to Mission data loads uh this technique of using a a very simplified seep sequence has minimized the changes required on Mission data loads uh they were going to take the actual software that we plan to use and and put it through its Paces in um in the uh facility that's a hardware software integration facility that Boeing has the team has been doing um practice runs uh in a training facility when I say the team the ground team has been doing runs just to make sure they understand the differences between the uncrewed and uncrewed and and really I think it's um I would say uh unconnecting muscle memory almost if you've been training for two years to do things a certain way with the control team on the ground with the crew on board where you can make calls to the crew to do certain actions they now have to take those actions and so they've been doing those practices and there's an integrated simulation next week on Wednesday with the ISS flight control team the undock sequence is always a an orchestrated a series of events between how ISS gets configured uh how we depress the interface between Starliner and the ISS how we configure the the guidance navigation control for the space station and the software and so they're going to do that integrated practice next Wednesday and we'll take our time if that goes well you know we'll we'll pick an undock dat and if it doesn't we need more simulations we'll we'll go ahead and pivot we've laid out a schedule that allows us the opportunity to to have some flexibility in Starliner R do and that's been very important for Dana and I next question is from Jeff fa from space news good afternoon question for uh Ken Bowersox or Steve Stitch you mentioned ear earlier in the briefing that it was a very close decision on deciding to bring back Starliner on crude I'm wondering if you can quantify that in some way was there some particular piece of of data or missing piece of data that really swayed that decision um that very close decision thank you so I'll I'll give it from my point of view uh the answer and then Steve can weigh in um if you look at it we knew going in that the um crude flight test uh was probably a little higher risk than a uh typical uh rotation with uh with dragon where we've flown multiple flights um that's why we called it a flight test right um we had the issues coming uphill and and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty and how much more risk there was um anytime you change from your nominal plan that you've spent uh years developing you increase risk on the other side and the type of risks I'm talking about are uh that um uh something that we've analyzed for contingency return with the crew on the on the mid deck of the dragon or um the the um necessity of sending up new suits where the crews weren't able to try out the the pressure suits on the ground so that they would have suits on the dragon uh those types of things raise your your risk a little bit on that side and so now both of your risk levels have gone up uh and you knew going in that one was a little a little bit higher and you've got uncertainty on just where it fits so so you have to really dig in to understand um what the the Baseline risk change is and that's what the team has been working so hard this last couple of months um for me one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem because of the heating effects that happened on the way uphill but Steve can tell you a lot more yeah thanks Ken yeah I'll just mention a couple things uh one we had uh some Thruster experts come in and and talked to us a few weeks ago and and we are clearly operating this Thruster U at a higher temperature at times than it was designed for I think that was a factor that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully um we're operating the Thruster outside of where it should be operated in um understanding could we have could a Thruster just fail off gracefully or could there be another failure mode that is Not So Graceful I think that was an important factor as we talked about the two differences um I mentioned the starboard uh dogghouse and so for some reason the heating is higher in that starboard dogghouse that we we do not understand when an omac Thruster fires the other thrusters get heated at a much higher rate than we expected um we don't we don't have a Clos Loop model to predict the performance we we tried we worked very hard of trying to Anchor a model based on what we saw at Whit Sands and then knowing what you had in the uphill phase knowing that you have a model that can replicate what we saw can you didn't predict the downhill we really just couldn't get there uh over the last number of weeks um also how close we were to a to a cliff in other words we've damaged the Teflon on some thrusters so when we start to fire at them again will that damage repeat uh or get back to a point where where now the thrusters are at the levels we saw uh on the on the docking day very quickly and then really it's the consequences of failure when we started thinking about um the kind of failures we might get uh we had those on docking day and those were in a even though we were 200 meters from station it's a very benign environment this sequence when the deit burn has to execute and then you get into the sep sequence it's a very rapid sequence from the completion of the burn to then getting into the separation the number of minutes later and there's no real time to reconfigure so when we laid it all out that's where the prance of of the risk was to not put a crew on the vehicle our next question is from Manisha ravetti from space.com hi thanks so much for doing this I think my question is mostly for Dana um I was wondering what are some of the challenges that you faced um in like accommodating this delay with ISS operations like I would guess that there are maybe changes you had to make with food allocation or other supplies and task Division and then relatedly you mentioned that even with this 2025 planned return date it is like the trip is within the scope of what you're comfortable with like for astronauts traveling to the ISS so what what do you think would have been too long for this day and like to point out which we should be guess worried about the fact that they're still up there thank you let's see for the first first part of your question um just at a high level from a a programmatic standpoint we protect for about 4 months of what we call consumables reserves so food water um different kinds of consumables we have on board those are those are the two biggies um four months for four crew is what we protect for so we always stay above that amount we do that intentionally so that if we had a problem with the delivery a cargo flight that didn't make it for example we'd have margin um so we always have a little more than than what we need for some period of time it's not Limitless in this particular case we did have a resupply mission in fact just a few weeks ago the North grman 21 flight came up so we had our eye on that flight and so once we realized the team was working through issues and we were likely to have Butch and sunny on board we changed that flight's manifest so we added more supplies to keep us above that Reserve um level we've also got the SpaceX 31 cargo flight coming up around the corner so we've got extra supplies on that and so we've been able to modify and adjust um our cargo Mission supplies to accommodate uh the extra the extra Mals were feeding no one has had to go on a diet or calorie restrictions um so we haven't had any limitations there in terms of duration on board you know you ask an interesting question one of the things as an agency that's really important for us is to understand the impacts of long duration space flight on the crew and so so far our experience base and that of um The cosmina Experience base is up to about 12 months uh give or take and so we understand very well uh performance implications and what it looks like for operations and and crew Health there so you're asking the question about how long is too long I don't think we as an agency know the answer to that we can tell you that we understand what 12 months does we're interested in that from Moon to Mars and those are some of our research objectives and what we're trying to learn in the microgravity environment but no specific concerns with 8 months or or even up to a year and so far data suggests that as long as we've got the right mitigations on board exercise you know the crew spends about two and a half hours a day with cardio and and weightlifting and as long as we can keep them um in shape with rigorous routines Etc uh we've done a pretty good job keeping the crews Health up with long duration stay next question is from Tim fernholz from payload space thank you for for taking my question this morning I was just curious if you have any thoughts now on what might have been done to avoid this scenario after ofd 2 if more attention should have been paid to redesigning the propulsion system or if there were decisions that should have been made during the test campaign to avoid the scenario thank you yeah I I'll take the question I yeah I think if we look back at of2 now with this newer lens of what we learned at Whit Sands uh C certainly could we have explored of2 in a little more detail either uh leading to some redesign of the dogghouse to get the thermal environment lower or operate the thrusters differently I think it's it's easy to do that in hindsight you know if we went back and and thought about the the whole integrated problem a little bit more uh could we have done some kind of testing what what I would say is it's it's very difficult to test uh the doghouse environment on the ground you've got thrusters that fire in multiple directions and it's very hard on the ground to have a a test facility a vacuum chamber that accommodates Thruster firings in multiple directions so and then get the thermal right uh in that dog house and keep the thermal up so there was no easy way to do that test on the ground we thought obviously we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the the temperatures that they were qualified for clearly there were some misses back in qualification we're going to go through that data in more detail uh postflight and then figure out what we can do to go fix them and then also look at our process I would say we're going to look at the certification process I know Boeing's looking at their process as well on how they got here we're doing the same thing on the NASA side next question is from Sawyer Rosenstein from nasaspace light.com hi thank you so much for taking my question um earlier you mentioned that there would be a simplified undocking procedure can you kind of explain what that means of what this undocking would be like compared to say with crew uh and what the contingency would be if there is an issue at some point with that undocking and burn away from the station yeah I I can answer the question so normally we would back away from the space station um essentially go uh out in front and then above the space station and then eventually end up below the space station and then on a trajectory that that goes beneath it and out in front of the space station that was our normal normal plan to undock um uh heading into the flight before the flight now what we're going to do is execute a a small number the the undocking itself with the NASA docking system will be exactly the same we'll use the same uh techniques the software will command undocking will drive a sequence of hooks they'll open up after we've uh depressurized that area in between uh the vehicles and then we'll we'll undock and there's some Springs that push the vehicle away um what we'll do is we'll go through a a SE sequence that puts us on I would say What's called a a pag grade trajectory and so we'll end up going essentially phasing out behind the space station to a safe distance and then we'll get away from the space station execute the deorbit burn so we've used that kind of St sequence in the past in other vehicles uh We've tested this SE sequence it is already in the software it's it's one of the Breakout sequen that are already in the software and so what we'll do is just go command that sequence early uh and use that to get away more quickly um and so it's it's it's pretty simple pretty elegant it was a great idea by the Boeing team our next question is from David Curley from Full Throttle thank you very much Steve Stitch and Bowers sucks I I think I heard Stitch say that that White Sands testing was kind of the turning point for you and I thought Bowersox kind of went in a little different direction there and it it seems to me that Boeing and NASA Drew different conclusions from those tests um NASA believing that there were potential for losing some of the thrusters Boeing said at the time that uh they got pretty close to root cause and were probably within reasonable risk to use them so did you get to two different conclusions and was it actually the key factor the White Sands test that led to this decision today and did I hear that you're not ruling out the potential of a four-person crew for a next Carolin flight so let me start with the first question I think um the Steve was talking about how we process the data I was talking about being encouraged by the fact that we had new data anytime you have new data it means that you can analyze it and find out that that things are um um proceeding uh well and and you can converge the team with that new data what Steve found was maybe a little bit different and that's why it probably sounded different um how we reacted yeah I would say at at Whit s we we were excited and that was really a turning point in that we were able to replicate uh the loss of thrust uh we simulated the the uphill profile in other words how the thrusters fired from the launch sequence into on orbit all the way to docking we did two of those uphill sequences and then we did a number of downhills and so we were encouraged when we saw that we could actually see thrust degradation in those downhill runs what then was new is once we took the Thruster apart and we looked at the the valve on the oxide oxidizer side we saw this swelling um on the Teflon seat which uh when we talked to the the vendor ajet rodine they had never seen this before in this particular Thruster and so I think that's where there was a change in the risk posture initially we were somewhat excited by replicating the damage but or the degradation and the thrust but then when we looked a little more closely we saw this swelling on the Teflon and then that gave us a whole new uh idea of the physics involved in the failure mode and then that led us to study that failure mode a lot more in the last few weeks um relative to the four-person Starliner crew uh you know we haven't really had those discussions yet we need to get the vehicle back we need to work through our our sequence of events on what changes we'll make both for the helium leaks and the thrusters and then we'll make a decision on the next flight it's a little premature to discuss that next question is from David denal from about space today good afternoon I'd like to see if we can get a individual consensus across the panel we've talked about the voting what about the risk assessment was it a 5050 possibility of coming back was it a 7525 decision or a 9010 decision that starer would be safe well you know Starliner still has to come back um UNCW right and and and uh and we believe that that Starliner uh coming back uncrewed although um higher than the risk we'd be willing to uh take to put crew on it is a reasonable thing to do to finish the test flight and and gather the the data that we want to gather to give you a percentage on um on on polling or or how people feel I think that's pretty tough to do um all I can say for sure is that when we poll today the all the people that we asked from the senior um management of the different organizations um that are uh involved with human space flight um they all concurred that we should um have the crew come down on a different vehicle than the current Starliner our next question is from Marvin Marshall from the space report news hi good afternoon uh my question is uh for administrator Nelson you know I'm speaking on behalf of millions who share you know the same concern know given that SpaceX operates four soon to be five crew dragons and uh three cargo dragons that can resolve anomalies in days or weeks rather than you know months or years all while receiving you know a few billion less than blowing so we're just you know curious why does NASA continue to support a company you know with a history like this you know you know we get the irrational was to have two options to ensure you know Rel liability and redundancy but you know that's what you get with spacex's ability to operate multiple spacecraft quickly address anomalies you know Jim free associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox commercial crew program manager Steve Stitch International Space Station program manager Dana wiel and flight operation director Norm Knight we'll be taking questions from those in the room and over the phone as a reminder you can press star one to get into the que but first I'd like to hand it over to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well Boeing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety our core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to Boeing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission director and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a HRI came through here while their homes were damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jamman thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference and for for our meetings you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our mission safely um I'm really proud proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so our next step will be uh to to process uh toward that uncrewed uh flight test um to um finish those preparations and we'll have another uh part two of the Readiness review um Wednesday or Thursday next week we believe um to to make sure that we're we're ready for undock and to complete the test um we are still in the middle of a test flight we have to remain Vigilant um we need to get the vehicle back on Deck uh go through the data and once we've done that um we'll we'll start thinking about our next steps um for Starliner next flight and now I'd like to pass the the mic to Steve to share more info and more details thanks Ken and thanks for the kind words uh I want to thank all of you for being here and uh the public and everybody for following progress over the summer uh it's it's been a long summer it's been a long summer for our team and I want to first start out by thanking our team who's worked so hard over the summer um long hours uh weekends nights testing analysis reviews I mean it has just been an incredible effort by the team um we are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters and I'll talk more about that but it's challenging to predict their performance it's challenging to predict the temperatures will see and so that's why it's it's been tough and it's taken the time ever since uh we docked back in on June 6th to get to this point I'm very proud of the due diligence that the team has uh displayed uh their perseverance their fortitude courage uh dedication resilience as they learn more and we got more data and different results at times than we expected I especially want to thank the Boeing team and their contractor team AET rocked uh the engine manufacturer the valve manufacturer Moog all their suppliers that participated uh along with uh the NASA Workforce we have brought in expertise from just about every NASA Center we did testing at the Marshall space flight center of course our Whit sand test facility did testing on the thrusters so this has been a huge effort across to all of NASA uh within the commercial crew program and even Beyond um deter the position uh to bring Starliner back on crude was very difficult for me personally we're all committed to the mission which we started out which is to bring Butch and sunny back but as we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner un crude and I'll talk about the other aspects of the mission uh in a little bit um you know um the the bottom line relative to Bringing Starliner back is it was just there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters if we had a model if we had a way to accurately predict uh what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence I think we would have taken a different course of action but when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for Thruster failures with a crew on board uh and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deal burn which puts the vehicle on an entry and then immediately uh maneuvering from that into a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module it was just too much risk with the crew and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed uh test um the path forward now is to as Ken said work toward the flight Ren review part two will we review now we know the scope of the mission we know it's an UNCW test flight uh we are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we'll review those aspects at the Readiness review we're going to go with a simplified uh separation technique to get away from station a little more quickly um we'll get to the de over at burn and execute that nominally uh we have a good setup in terms of the opportunities uh into the Whit sand space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September um we'll we'll land or undock in early September and then we have a lot of work to do uh relative to the the rest of the mission which is Bush and sunny stay on the space station for some time and they return on Cru crew 9 we're configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra uh two different seats so we'll have two different crew members uh two crew members on that vehicle and then we'll have it ready to bring Butch and sunny home so they'll be ballasted in two seats on the uphill um we also have to work to reconfigure the The Crew 8 vehicle when Starliner undocks it will undock first and then the crew8 vehicle will serve as the Lifeboat for Butch and sunny we have a configuration on the cargo pallet will'll go put in place so again um we'll get Calypso home ready to do so we're going to take uh our time taking the steps uh each step along the way we'll have an important simulation ahead of that flight Readiness review with the flight control team you know if you put yourself in their place they have practiced uh for two years to bring a crew home on Starliner there are some differences uh in executing the undoc sequence and the uh Coast to the deorbit burn and the deorbit burn without a crew and so they're going to practice rce that next week um I'm extremely grateful for the commercial crew program the entire team uh it's an honor to represent them here today and I'll turn it over to Dana wiel thank you Steve thank you all very much for being here for your interest in this uh historic test flight Mission and also in the International Space Station um as you heard with the decision to leave Butch and sunny on board till February they'll be with us on station for eight months I think most of you know our normal Expedition dur operations are 6 months long but we have had a number of uh flights with astronauts who' stayed on board with us for 12 months at a time so this eight-month stays very much within our normal operational experience base while Butch and sunny are on board they'll be doing science station maintenance um they'll execute the SpaceX 31 research and cargo Mission and we may have a couple space walks for them towards the end of their expedition um since they've been up there they've been a welcome set of Helping Hands they've already done about a 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments and they've helped us with some of the uh critical station maintenance that we've had on board for us looking forward the station team is focused on the planning and the rework for the uh undock the Starliner undock as you heard from Steve that's targeted for early September before we hit that undock window we're going to do the work to reconfigure the create Dragon probably do that within the next week or so to have that in place for a six crew contingency return capability and just to reiterate as Steve said this just gives us a a contingency capability after Starliner departs and before the crew n vehicle arrives uh crew nine with two crew will launch no earlier than September 24th we'll do a normal uh Handover uh between the the crews and then we'll have crew undock after that we will relocate the crew n vehicle so that Dragon vehicle will be relocated to open up the forward port for the SpaceX 31 cargo Mission and we're planning that mission somewhere in mid October in between all of that we've got a soy use crew exchange that's happening uh September 11th will be the launch of 73s that'll be carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and then Tracy Dyson will go home after that emplo es exchange so we've got a lot of uh busy activities in in front of us this fall um on behalf of the station program I do want to thank the entire team the commercial crew program the Boeing team and all of our technical teams they've done a tremendous amount of work over the summer getting us to the point where we have enough data and enough information to make this really critical and difficult decision that we've made today so very much appreciated and uh as I think all of you know commercial crew program is a critical to the success of ISS so we appreciate everything they've done and with that I'll hand it over to Norm Knight thank you Dana I want to thank all of you for your continued interest in our mission and I want to Echo my gratitude for the teams on the ground both Boeing and NASA and our astronauts on board for their tireless work and effort with this test flight over many years especially during the last few months you know with the dedication to or the decision to fly Starliner home uncrewed the ground teams will still be fully engaged uring St liner returns safely know while the teams are hard at work here on the ground we also have Butch and sunny living and working 260 miles above our planet they're giving our teams valuable feedback on Starliner they've served as an integral part of our on orbit uh uh increment and they demonstrated patience adaptability flexibility resilience and Readiness that's what you get with an American astronaut they've been eager to contribute to important conversations they've asked questions they seemlessly become part of the Expedition 71 crew contributing to the important work on board the International Space Station you know when you're charting New Paths for exploration there are highs and lows we all know this it's part of exploration in moving forward space flight is hard the margins are thin the space environment is not forgiving and we have to be right we all know this this was a tough problem to be solved and a decision had to be made I want you to remember Starliner is a robust vehicle with excellent flying qualities is evidenced by the manual demonstration accomplished by Butch prior to docking and Starliner has performed exceptionally well overall so please don't lose sight of that this is a test flight and the Thruster issue and the associated investigations will pay huge dividends in the future for human exploration in a great way when Starliner flies again I am encouraged by the dedication and resilience both the NASA and Boeing ground teams and of course our space Flyers exhibit I talked with but and sunny uh both yesterday and today they support the agency's decision fully and they're ready to continue this mission on board ISS as members of the Expedition 71 crew I would also be