NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a \u201cType A\u201d mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.<\/p>\n
As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner\u2019s developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are taking ownership of our shortcomings,\u201d Isaacman said.<\/p>\n
The letter and a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon were remarkable for the amount of accountability taken by NASA. Moreover, at Isaacman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cStarliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,\u201d Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. \u201cIt is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Isaacman said there would be \u201cleadership accountability\u201d as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken.<\/p>\n
The \u201cType A\u201d classification of Starliner comes more than a year and a half after the vehicle\u2019s ill-fated, initial crewed flight in early June 2024. During the more than daylong journey to the space station after launching on an Atlas V rocket, Starliner was beset by helium leaks in its propulsion system and then intermittent thruster failures.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. \u201cWe accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,\u201d said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. \u201cWe just had an outstanding day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the subsequent weeks of the summer of 2024, NASA mostly backed Boeing, saying that its primary option was bringing the crew home on Starliner.<\/p>\n
Finally, by early August, NASA publicly wavered and admitted that Wilmore and Williams might return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Yet Boeing remained steadfast. On a Boeing website called \u201cStarliner Updates\u201d that has since gone offline, as late as August 2, 2024, the company was declaring that its \u201cconfidence remains high\u201d in Starliner\u2019s return with crew (see archive).<\/p>\n
However, on August 24, NASA made it official and decided that Wilmore and Williams would not fly back on Starliner. Instead, the crew would come home on a Crew Dragon. Wilmore and Williams eventually returned to Earth safely in March 2025 as part of the Crew 9 mission.<\/p>\n
The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.<\/p>\n
\nEssentially, Wilmore could not fully control Starliner any longer. But simply abandoning the docking attempt was not a palatable solution. Just as the thrusters were needed to control the vehicle during the docking process, they were also necessary to position Starliner for its deorbit burn and reentry to Earth\u2019s atmosphere. So Wilmore had to contemplate whether it was riskier to approach the space station or try to fly back to Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if we can. And matter of fact, I\u2019m thinking we probably can\u2019t. So there we are, loss of 6DOF control, four aft thrusters down, and I\u2019m visualizing orbital mechanics. The space station is nose down. So we\u2019re not exactly level with the station, but below it. If you\u2019re below the station, you\u2019re moving faster. That\u2019s orbital mechanics. It\u2019s going to make you move away from the station. So I\u2019m doing all of this in my mind. I don\u2019t know what control I have. What if I lose another thruster? What if we lose comm? What am I going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore\u2019s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.<\/p>\n
\u201cPretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,\u201d Isaacman said during the teleconference. \u201cWhat levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.\u201d<\/p>\n
Concerns predate the crew flight test<\/h2>\n
Some of NASA\u2019s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.<\/p>\n
During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe investigations often stopped at the proximate cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly,\u201d Isaacman said. \u201cIn some cases, the proximate-cause diagnosis itself was incorrect due to insufficient rigor in following the data to its logical conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
What happens next<\/h2>\n
In the 11 months since the return of Wilmore and Williams, NASA and Boeing have agreed that the next flight of Starliner, although intended to dock with the International Space Station, will fly without crew. NASA has previously said this flight could take place as early as April 2026.<\/p>\n
However, when asked about this timeline, Isaacman reiterated that a lot of work had to be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if we can implement a lot of the report recommendations, then we will fly again.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement on Thursday, Boeing said it was \u201ccommitted\u201d to being one of NASA\u2019s two commercial crew providers.<\/p>\n
A source recently told Ars that two NASA astronauts, Woody Hoburg and Jessica Wittner, have begun training for a potential \u201cStarliner-2\u201d mission that could take flight during the first half of next year, should the uncrewed test flight in 2026 go well. NASA has not confirmed that any astronauts have been assigned to Starliner-1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a \u201cType A\u201d mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure. As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner\u2019s developer, Boeing, as well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}