The problems with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew spacecraft went far deeper than glitches with thrusters and control systems. It was part of a broken safely culture, NASA says.
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a press conference on Thursday, reading from a letter he sent to NASA employees and posted on X. “It’s decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
These problems culminated in Starliner’s snake-bit crewed debut in June 2024, when an apparently successful launch was followed by thruster problems on the capsule that almost prevented astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from docking with the International Space Station. The severity of those problems became public later as NASA sent Starliner back to Earth uncrewed in September, with Williams and Wilmore remaining on the ISS until their return aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule in March 2025.
The astronauts later told Ars Technica’s space reporter Eric Berger that Starliner’s thruster failures had cascaded to the point that they could no longer control the spacecraft in all axes–making it impossible to dock with the ISS and threatening any safe reentry. Only what Wilmore called heroic troubleshooting by Mission Control allowed a reset of most of the thrusters and a safe docking.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (right) and Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya (Credit: Joel Kowsky/NASA)
On Thursday, Isaacman announced that NASA was reclassifying that thruster breakdown from a “High Visibility Close Call” to a “Type A mishap,” the agency’s highest category.
Until these and other Starliner snafus are fixed, that spacecraft will not launch with people aboard: “NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected, the propulsion system is fully qualified, and appropriate investigation recommendations are implemented.”
‘There Will Be Leadership Accountability’
Isaacman’s letter and a 311-page, partially redacted report outline multiple flaws in design and testing of Starliner’s thrusters that left them vulnerable to overheating and getting stuck or blocked, plus instrumentation shortfalls that impeded diagnosing failures. Those problems also resurfaced on Starliner’s way home, leaving only one thruster still capable of controlling the vehicle.
The report documents how that deorbit risk dated to a “fundamental” failure to design in sufficient redundancy, despite attempts by Boeing engineers to warn management about it in 2016, 2017, and 2021.
The letter and report describe widespread failures to communicate, both inside the agency and its contractor and between them. Isaacman described them as “a culture of mistrust that can never happen again.”
He vowed: “There will be leadership accountability.”
The report goes on to cite employees describing an “overwhelming and, at times, counterproductive” environment in which NASA experts felt they had to prove that Starliner’s thrusters were unsafe instead of Boeing needing to demonstrate their safety. Some sample quotes:
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“There was yelling in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive.”
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“I heard them berate the safety engineers off muted mics.”
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“It was probably the ugliest environment that I’ve been in.”
While the press conference featured Isaacman and associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, Boeing representatives did not participate.
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The company sent PCMag a statement afterwards welcoming the report and pledging to work with NASA. “In the 18 months since our test flight, Boeing has made substantial progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report,” it read in part. “NASA’s report will reinforce our ongoing efforts to strengthen our work, and the work of all Commercial Crew Partners, in support of mission and crew safety, which is and must always be our highest priority.”
The ISS is scheduled to be retired in 2030, and Starliner is already nearly a decade behind its original aspirations. When NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion commercial-crew contract alongside a $2.6 billion award to SpaceX in 2014, it set a goal of crewed flights beginning in 2017. SpaceX reached that goal in 2020 and has since carried people to orbit 20 times, Isaacman twice among them as a private astronaut.
(In an alternate universe, NASA would have gone with conventional wisdom in Congress and awarded a single commercial-crew contract to Boeing, and the US would still depend solely on Russia to take astronauts to and from the ISS.)
Starliner entering operational service to the ISS seems farther than ever, but the administrator said that private space stations that firms are vying to build to replace the ISS would ensure enough demand for Boeing’s crew vehicle.
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“There will be other space stations, I guarantee it,” Isaacman said in response to one of multiple questions about Starliner’s remaining usefulness. “And they are going to require crew and cargo access to and from low Earth orbit, and I think the nation and the world benefits when you have multiple providers that are capable of doing it.”
Asked about what the “leadership responsibility” noted in the letter might mean, the administrator didn’t get into specifics but did say this “breakdown in culture” went “right up to the administrator.”
Isaacman’s predecessor under President Biden, former Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D), himself went to space once, flying on the Space Shuttle’s mission just before 1986’s loss of Challenger.
A veteran of NASA who has often been a sharp critic of the agency offered a thumbs-up to Isaacman’s handling of this. “This is rather blunt and to the point,” Keith Cowing, publisher of NASA Watch, said Thursday of the administrator’s comments. “There’s no wiggle room in the words.”
But he added that the entire agency needs to stay focused on solving the underlying problems. “The first thing is that you admit you have a problem,” he said. “When you think you’ve solved it, you have to go back and ask if you fixed it.”
Isaacman, who became a billionaire after founding the payments firm Shift4, was originally set to start at NASA last spring but President Trump yanked his nomination in late May, apparently for him being insufficiently MAGA. Then in November, after months of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wearing a second hat as interim NASA administrator, Trump re-nominated Isaacman; the Senate confirmed him weeks later.
Cowing offered a vote of confidence in Isaacman in line with comments from other NASA observers about the administrator, who is also a private pilot certified in multiple military and civilian aircraft. “This guy understands what’s being talked about,” Cowing said. “You can’t bullshit this guy and get away with it.”
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