Following an investigation into the Starliner mishap that left NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore stuck on the International Space Station for nine months, the agency says its own leadership is largely to blame.
During a Thursday press briefing, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that while Williams and Wilmore were aboard the ISS and NASA was evaluating next steps, leadership continued to prioritize the overarching program goal of maintaining multiple crew transport systems, even when mission and crew safety should have come first.
Isaacman said it was widely understood that there was another spacecraft available to bring the astronauts home, but the agency instead spent nearly three months trying to diagnose and fix Starliner’s technical problems so that it could return to Earth with its crew. The spacecraft ultimately departed without Williams and Wilmore, who spent another six months on the ISS before they flew home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
This not only resulted in a mishap but also created “trust issues” and a “breakdown in culture” that leadership failed to course correct, Isaacman said, adding that the issue extended across multiple levels of the agency and “right up to the administrator of NASA.” At the time, that was Bill Nelson.
“I can’t imagine in a situation like that why there would not have been some direct involvement to bring people back to the mission and the crew and figure out the correct pathway forward,” he said.
Oversight failures, technical shortcomings
Starliner was plagued by technical issues before, during, and after the June 2024 flight that brought Williams and Wilmore to the ISS, primarily helium leaks and thruster malfunctions. The spacecraft returned uncrewed in September 2024, and since then, NASA has been investigating the cause of these problems and working with Boeing to address them.
The agency released the findings from that internal investigation during Thursday’s briefing. The report identifies multiple factors—including combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns—that “created risk conditions inconsistent with NASA’s human spaceflight safety standards,” according to an agency statement.
Isaacman said that as Starliner’s development progressed, design compromises and inadequate hardware qualification “extended beyond NASA’s complete understanding.” While technical anomalies are common in spaceflight, Starliner had qualification deficiencies that made it less reliable for crew survival than other vehicles, he added.
“We managed the contract, we accepted the vehicle, we launched the crew to space, we made decisions from docking through post-mission actions,” Isaacman said. “A considerable portion of the responsibility and accountability rests here.” It’s unclear whether punitive action will be taken against NASA or Boeing employees involved in the incident.
NASA won’t turn its back on Starliner
While the investigation identified the organizational root causes, efforts to identify the proximate or direct causes for the service module and crew module thruster anomalies are ongoing, Isaacman said. NASA will continue working closely with Boeing to get Starliner ready to fly crew to and from low-Earth orbit, but if the ISS is retiring in 2030, what’s the point?
In response to that question, Isaacman said one of NASA’s top priorities is to “ignite the orbital economy,” which will necessitate numerous commercial space stations. Having multiple vehicles capable of transporting crew and cargo to LEO will therefore remain necessary long after NASA decommissions the ISS, he said.
“We certainly hope, and we intend, to fully work with Boeing in the months ahead to get to [the] technical cause of the thruster issues, to implement the recommendations from the independent investigation, and return to crewed flight,” Isaacman said. NASA currently has plans to launch a Starliner cargo mission no earlier than April, followed by up to three crew rotations.
Both the agency and Boeing have a lot of work to do before that will be possible, and it’s difficult to imagine that this infamous spacecraft will be ready to fly in two months. The fate of this program not only depends on how quickly engineers can fix Starliner’s technical shortcomings but also on NASA’s ability to rebuild trust between leadership, its workforce, and the astronauts who rely on sound decision-making.
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