By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) – NASA on Thursday released a sweeping report on Boeing’s botched Starliner mission that left two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station for nearly a year, 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 short-notice news conference that coincided 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.
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 over engineering challenges and agency standards 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.”
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.
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, of roughly $2 billion in charges the company has taken so far on the program since 2016.
The total value of Boeing’s NASA contract since its 2014 award has increased by roughly $300 million to $4.5 billion, due to development setbacks and added testing, with some $2.2 billion of the total amount paid to Boeing so far.
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.
Wilmore and Williams, both veteran test pilots and astronauts, safely returned to Earth last year on a SpaceX craft after their faulty Starliner capsule returned empty.
“First and foremost, 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 recur,” Isaacman told reporters.
The report also lists four previously known technical anomalies that led to mission-failure status, including Starliner’s propulsion system glitches that complicated its ability to dock with the ISS in the first hours of its mission.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, David Gregorio and Diane Craft)
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