NASA’s official statement on Crew-9’s return. Of particular note, the schedule was pulled a month earlier.

Press release posted on Aug 24, 2024, says: “Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission.”

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-starliner-spacecraft-back-to-earth-without-crew/

Crew-10 was delayed due to issues certifing its Dragon capsule, after Crew-9 launched. In January it was decided to fly Crew-10 on a Dragon originally slated to fly a private ISS mission, which was always scheduled to occur after Crew-10. The statement is referring to a rescheduling of a rescheduling.

Integrating the Starliner IFT-2 crew into Crew-9 was objectively the right decision. At the time Starliner launched the Dragon/ISS flight Schedules was Polaris, Crew-9, Crew-10, Axiom. Polaris’ Dragon had been modified for EVA support including having its docking adapter switched for the Skywalker. It was delayed do to weather and then to keep the pad free after issues with IFT-2. Crew-9’s dragon was ready to go, as was Axiom’s. Crew-10 was slated to use a new Dragon.

When the decision was made to not return the IFT-2 Crew with their Starliner, a new ride had to be found to minimize the time they relied on the contingency plan of hopping in the cargo bay of a Dragon like it’s a pickup truck on a country road (it’s more technocal, prepared for and probable would be fine, and within established safety margins). To do this and service all missions, including NASA Crew rotation, which is why NASA contributed so heavily to Dragon’s development and pays a high cost for launches, we NASA primary concerns.

Using Crew-9’s Dragon as the return vehicle required no additional launches (which require funding and NASA doesn’t have a 200 million dollar slush fund, they have the US Congress) while minimizing time to launch, and not using the only operational Dragon that had not been modified for a completely different mission profile. Had they launched a dedicated mission there would not have been a Dragon ready to go to the space station until Crew-10’s was finished being built and tested, or a decent amount of work and testing on Polaris’ was done.

This is a really tired conversation. NASA has truly learned from it’s past disasters and generally makes very prudent with regard to crewed launches, really all of there big budget missions to, they are pretty picky whennit comes to lobing half bilion dolar probes at Jupiter too. Most of the things you can ding NASA for are directly the result of politics shifting funding and resources. NASA handled Boeing’s failure well by managing the fleet provided by the other Commercial Crew supplier such that there was minimal time without an available ISS capable vehicle both on station and ready to launch. That was literally the point of dual sourcing Commercial Crew.

https://www.houstonpress.com/news/starliner-astronauts-put-on-hold-again-for-return-to-earth-19554396