After a year-long investigation, an independent report conducted by NASA has dubbed Boeing Starliner’s crewed 2024 test flight one of the federal space agency’s biggest failures, on par with the space shuttle disasters, according to a report issued on Thursday.
The mission, which was originally slated to last for eight to 10 days, resulted in astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams being stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months after NASA officials opted out of having the pair return home aboard the malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft.
Specifically, the report has dubbed the mission a “Type A” failure, a category that the federal space agency reserves for any incident that causes more than $2 million damage, loss of vehicle control, the loss of a vehicle or deaths. The 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia shuttle disasters also fall under this category.
“While there were no injuries and the mission regained control prior to docking, this highest-level classification designation recognizes there was potential for a significant mishap,” NASA officials noted in a statement.
When discussing the report’s release, NASA Administrator Jason Isaacman – whose close ties with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk saw his nomination for this position spiked before it was resubmitted for Senate confirmation late last year – excoriated Boeing and NASA leadership for having allowed the crewed flight to even launch in the first place, saying that this decision was “inconsistent with NASA safety culture.”
“It’s decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight,” he said.
Starliner has been plagued with problems and delays over the course of more than a decade in development. Boeing was supposed to have Starliner through its crewed flight test by 2017, but the project has been running years behind schedule and is now more than $2 billion over budget.
So many previous launch attempts had been scrubbed due to helium leaks and thruster malfunction that by the time the spacecraft actually thundered off of its launchpad it was almost a surprise that the flight hadn’t also been cancelled in its final seconds. However, by the time Starliner reached the International Space Station it was once again experiencing helium leaks and five of its 28 thrusters were not working, malfunctions severe enough to set off alarm bells at NASA.
When Starliner finally did touch down months later, its two-person crew was not aboard. Williams and Wilmore would not be able to come home until they hitched a ride aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Initially in the aftermath of what became a headline-grabbing debacle for NASA, the plan was to have the Commercial Crew Program before an outside investigation team was ultimately brought in to determine what went wrong.
The resulting 312-page report details that many things went wrong in a debacle that “revealed critical vulnerabilities in the Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model, and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight,” according to the report.
Starliner’s issues go all the way back to when NASA set up how Boeing and other commercial aerospace companies were going to develop the new spacecraft that would replace the shuttle. While NASA has been partnering with Boeing and other companies since the earliest day of the space program’s development, the agency was always heavily and directly involved in every stage of creating spacecraft and the rockets they would be launched on, according to the report.
However, NASA officials opted to create a new system with a more hands-off approach when they set up the commercial space program more than a decade. And the reality is, investigators found, that the new model didn’t really work. Instead, it resulted in a situation where NASA and Boeing’s teams ended up mistrusting each other. This in turn led to “chaotic meeting schedules, unclear roles and communication breakdowns” with “unclear governance” and “a risk assessment posture [that] created division and undermined confidence in the decision-making process,” according to the report.
“It was probably the ugliest environment I’ve ever been in,” one person interviewed by the investigators stated.
All of which makes the many problems that have cropped up over the course of Starliner’s development make a whole lot more sense.
Despite the fact that the spacecraft experienced problems with its thrusters and helium leaks during previous uncrewed test flights, as the commercial imperative of the new development system overrode NASA’s tradition of intense oversight and inquiry, the cause of those problems was never adequately explained before Williams and Wilmore clambered into the spacecraft, investigators found. Isaacman highlighted this during the press conference, noting that previous investigations often stopped short of the proximate or the direct cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly.”
Investigators also uncovered serious issues with how NASA officials actually handled things once it became clear that the astronauts might not be able to come back aboard Starliner as previously planned during the crewed test mission.
“There was yelling in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive,” an unnamed NASA employee stated in the report.
“There are some people that just don’t like each other very much, and that really manifested itself during CFT [the abbreviated name for the crewed Starliner test flight],” another NASA employee interviewed by investigators said.
In other words, Boeing Starliner didn’t work the way it was supposed to because the structure aimed at developing it was deeply dysfunctional.
It’s unclear at this point what the implications for these findings will be. During his press conference, Isaacman didn’t state whether any NASA officials will be fired over what was detailed in the report. That’s not the point, for now.
“I think setting the record straight, classifying this as a Type A mishap, ensures what happened here with this mission is appropriately recorded and can be referenced for future learning,” Isaacman said. “We’re trying to send a message about what is the right and wrong way to handle situations like this so that they do not reoccur.”