MILAN — NASA will use SpaceX's Crew Dragon for its two crew rotation missions to the International Space Station in 2025 as it continues to evaluate whether Boeing needs to conduct another test flight of its Starliner spacecraft.

In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for February 2025 at the earliest, and the Crew-11 mission, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025 to take place in July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew 11 mission.

Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the mission in early 2025. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified on time. This pushed the Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025 and postponed Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced at the time that it would prepare Crew-11 for launch in August 2025 in parallel with Starliner-1.

“The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once there is a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification,” NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions can best be achieved, including time windows for a possible Starliner flight in 2025.”

NASA has not provided any updates on the assessments of Starliner's Crew Flight Test mission, which ended with an uncrewed landing in New Mexico on September 7, after NASA concluded it was safer to have Wilmore and Williams early to return to the Crew-9 Crew Dragon mission in 2025. At the time of Starliner's return, agency officials suggested that they could still continue directly to Starliner-1 despite engine problems and helium leaks in the spacecraft.

“The data is currently being checked. “We have to make a decision: Do we need another test flight?” That's what NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said when asked about the status of the Starliner review at a press conference during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here on October 16 . She added that there is no timeline for completing this data review.

Another open question for future commercial crew flights is whether NASA and Roscosmos will continue to swap seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles. Such “integrated crews,” with NASA astronauts flying on Soyuz spacecraft and Roscosmos cosmonauts flying on Crew Dragon, are intended to ensure that both agencies maintain a presence on the station if one of the spacecraft is grounded for an extended period of time.

Currently, there are no NASA astronauts assigned to a Soyuz spacecraft other than Jonny Kim on the next Soyuz mission to the ISS, Soyuz MS-27 in March 2025. Roscosmos officials released crew lists in August for the following two Soyuz flights, Soyuz MS-28 in late 2025 and Soyuz MS-29 in 2026, which consisted entirely of Roscosmos cosmonauts.

At another IAC press conference on October 15, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson expressed confidence that NASA and Roscosmos would agree to an extension of the seat swap agreement. “That will come in due course. “It will be a normal negotiation,” he said. “We assume that the flights will continue to be integrated.”

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