By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - NASA on Thursday released a sweeping report on Boeing's botched Starliner mission that kept two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station for nine months, detailing communication breakdowns and "unprofessional behavior" as the agency and its longtime contractor struggled to agree on how to safely return the crew to Earth.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman ripped into Boeing and agency leadership for their handling of the Starliner mission during a news conference timed with the release of a 300-page report detailing technical and oversight failures behind the spacecraft's first crewed mission, which concluded last year.
"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 a letter to NASA employees, which he posted in full on X.
"It is decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight," he added, echoing findings in the report's "cultural and organizational" section.
Starliner's technical failures kept NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the ISS for nine months in a high-stakes test mission initially planned to last roughly a week.
On Earth, according to the report, Boeing and NASA officials sparred in tense meetings on how best to bring the crew home, with "unprofessional behavior" and yelling matches that countered the agency's norms of healthy technical debate and crisis management.
The report, completed in November and citing interviews with unnamed NASA officials, said "numerous interviewees mentioned defensive, unhealthy, contentious meetings during technical disagreements early in the mission."
"There was yelling in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive," one official reported. "It was probably the ugliest environment that I've been in," another said.
"There wasn't a clear path for conflict resolution between the teams. That led to a lot of frayed relationships and emotions," said another.
Boeing said in a statement that it was "grateful to NASA for its thorough investigation and the opportunity to contribute to it." The company, it added, has made progress on fixing Starliner's technical issues and has made organizational changes.
"WE FAILED THEM"
Wilmore and Williams, both veteran test pilots and astronauts, launched as Starliner's first test crew in June 2024. Five of the spacecraft's maneuvering thrusters failed roughly 24 hours into flight as it was approaching the ISS for an autonomous docking, prompting the crew to manually intervene.
The thruster issues were among four primary technical flaws Starliner experienced during the mission that set off months of debate and ground tests as "Butch and Suni" stayed on the ISS. They returned to Earth last year on a SpaceX craft after NASA opted to return Starliner to Earth empty.
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"They have so much grace, and they're so competent, the two of them. And we failed them. The agency failed them," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters.
Williams, now 60, retired from NASA in December, logging 608 days in space across three missions in her 27-year NASA career. Wilmore, now 63, retired in August after spending 25 years at the agency, clocking 464 days in space across three missions.
The report also describes a "fragile partnership dynamic" between NASA and Boeing, in which agency officials' concerns that Boeing could drop out of NASA's Commercial Crew Program influenced officials' decision-making on critical mission issues.
"This reluctance to challenge Boeing's interpretations and failure to act on engineering concerns has contributed to risk acceptance and a fragile partnership dynamic."
NASA retroactively classified the Starliner mission as a "Type A" mishap, the agency's most severe category of mission failure, triggered by factors such as damage to a spacecraft exceeding $2 million or a crew member's death or permanent disability.
Boeing has spent tens of millions of dollars on efforts to fix Starliner following the mission,. The company has taken roughly $2 billion in charges so far on the program since 2016.
But NASA last year reduced the contract's total value to $3.7 billion and cut the number of planned Starliner flights from six to four, as Boeing's engineering struggles inch closer to 2030, the planned retirement of the ISS.
RARE LEVEL OF DISCLOSURE FROM NASA'S COMMERCIAL CREW PROGRAM
NASA's decision to release a redacted version of its investigative findings was praised by former NASA officials and astronauts and marked a rare move for an agency office that has often sought to portray its collaboration with Boeing's Starliner unit as positive and constructive.
"It isn't easy, but if previous Admins had done same, safety & public trust would be higher," Lori Garver, former Deputy NASA Administrator and a key architect of the agency's commercial-focused contracting model, said of Isaacman's decision to release the report.
NASA's Commercial Crew Program seeded development of Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon capsule. The agency has made an imperative of having two U.S. vehicles for transporting its astronauts to the ISS in case one encounters issues.
The Dragon capsule has flown over 13 crews for NASA since 2020 with no mission failures, helping position Elon Musk's SpaceX as the U.S. space program's most prominent contractor.
Isaacman, a former customer of SpaceX's Dragon program who spent millions of dollars commanding two private missions in orbit, has long been critical of Boeing and other giant government contractors involved in delayed and over-budget programs, a view that has been shared by the Pentagon. Isaacman's ties with Musk concerned lawmakers during his confirmation hearings.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, David Gregorio and Diane Craft)
