On Friday evening, Boeing Co.’s Starliner capsule will undock from the International Space Station, marking another chapter in the saga of the troubled spacecraft.

Starliner will return to Earth uncrewed, with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — the NASA astronauts it transported to the orbiting space lab in June — forced to wait for a ride home with Boeing rival SpaceX in early 2025.

NASA’s decision to choose SpaceX to bring the astronauts home amid Starliner’s problems was a blow to Boeing. So what’s next for the Starliner program?

“BA recently suffered a setback when its Starliner capsule failed on its first human space flight,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Matthew Akers in a note on Boeing this week. “It’s unclear whether NASA will require further flight tests from BA before resuming manned flights.” Starliner, Akers added, has already incurred around $1.6 billion of additional costs versus its initial $4.2 billion fixed-price contract.

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Technion Professor Ehud Behar is quoted in this article.