NASA will finally send the ill-fated Boeing Starliner home—without its astronauts. Here’s how to watch its return

Boeing’s Starliner is finally scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) at 6:04 p.m. ET on Friday, September 6. It will return to Earth without its crew, a difficult decision NASA reached after weeks of deliberation. NASA will stream the undocking and reentry live on NASA+ and YouTube. Coverage is scheduled to start at 5:45 p.m. ET.

The entire undocking, deorbit, and reentry process will take about six hours, and landing is scheduled at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at around 12:04 a.m. ET on September 7. If weather prevents undocking, there are backup opportunities roughly every four days.

During undocking and reentry, Boeing and NASA will be watching the spacecraft closely to see whether it continues to have the same thruster problems that led to NASA yanking astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams off the flight entirely.

During the approach to and docking with the ISS on June 6, the Boeing Starliner experienced degraded thruster performance. After extensive testing on the ground and at the ISS, Boeing was able to trace the problem back to overheating. The Starliner has four “doghouses,” each of which holds a thruster pack. Firing thrusters led to more heat than expected within these doghouses, which impacted thruster performance. NASA could not predict how the thrusters would perform upon deorbit and reentry.

In the end, with the chilling legacy of space shuttles Challenger and Columbia hanging over the agency, NASA leadership unanimously opted to have the Boeing Starliner return unpiloted. NASA has repeatedly cited these two tragedies as relevant in the decision-making for this flight. (Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, has been a constant presence at press briefings for the Starliner. He is a former astronaut and was on the ISS when Columbia broke apart during reentry in 2003.)

Boeing has maintained that the vehicle is safe to return astronauts to Earth.

Meanwhile, Starliner astronauts Wilmore and Williams will have quite the extended stay on the ISS. Their initial mission was expected to last roughly eight days. Instead, they will have spent eight months on the ISS by the time they return to Earth as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission in February 2025.

Crew-9 is currently scheduled for launch no earlier than September 24, commanded by NASA astronaut Nick Hague, with mission specialist and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on board as well. There will be two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams, who will assume the duties of the two additional crew members for the duration of the six-month mission.