NASA Admin releases report on Starliner

We're approaching one year from the much delayed return of the Starliner astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. It ended a 2-week mission that turned into more like nine months all because of the horrific performance of the Boeing Starliner capsule, and I find it interesting that both Butch and Suni retired before the end of 2025. 

Today, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman released a long-awaited summary of the mission. 

The headline is that NASA has classified the Starliner mission as a “Type A” mishap. That level is the most serious on the scale that goes from A down to D and one without a letter but that's minor.  The definition at the linked page (.pdf) is the direct cost of mission failure and property damage greater than or equal to $2,000,000 with two other conditions aimed at aircraft mishaps rather than spacecraft.

As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner’s developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station.

“We are taking ownership of our shortcomings,” Isaacman said.

It's a big departure from the talk last summer, as we went from the mission up to the station, through the decision to send the two back down on Crew-9's Crew Dragon - by cutting Crew-9 down to two in order to have seats on the Dragon for Butch and Suni to come back down on.  We had months of Boeing saying things like, “We just had an outstanding day” and their “confidence remains high” in the Starliner safely returning the two to Earth. Some of those statements have been wiped from Boeing's public-facing records.

In recognition of NASA taking ownership of its shortcomings, Isaacman went farther.

The letter and a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon were remarkable for the amount of accountability taken by NASA. Moreover, at Isaacman’s direction, the space agency released an internal report, comprising 311 pages, that details findings from the Program Investigation Team that looked into the Starliner flight.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Within weeks of their arrival back on Earth, the crew gave an interview in which they described exactly what they encountered and it was truly scary. Yes, there were moments when they were concerned about whether or not they would survive. 

The short version of what happened is that management - both NASA and Boeing - minimized every problem Starliner had, going back to its second orbital flight test in May 2022, two years before the manned flight. There were failures that should have raised huge red flags that systems on Starliner were seriously bad. 

However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.

“The investigations often stopped at the proximate cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly,” Isaacman said. “In some cases, the proximate-cause diagnosis itself was incorrect due to insufficient rigor in following the data to its logical conclusion.” 

This is about as good a description as you'll get of an arthritic, brainless and useless bureaucracy. The fact that Isaacman recognizes this is a very good sign. There's a lot of hard work to come before they can become a useful, solid engineering team.

At this time, there's another test flight planned for Starliner. Currently expected to be uncrewed and as soon as April. Asked about this, let's Isaacman isn't sure it's ready. He sees need for lots of more work. 

“We are committed to helping Boeing work through this problem, to remediate the technical challenges, to fully understand the risk associated with this vehicle, and to try and minimize it to the greatest extent possible,” he said. “And if we can implement a lot of the report recommendations, then we will fly again.”

For their part, Boeing says they're committed to being a commercial crew mission provider. 

Starliner docked to the ISS during June 2024's flight. Image credit: NASA