NASA chief slams Boeing, agency failures in botched Starliner mission

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Fri, February 20, 2026 at 11:16 AM GMT+9

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STORY: :: NASA:: The NASA chief slams Boeing and agency leaders over the Starliner mission that left astronauts stuck in space:: February 19, 2026:: Jared Isaacman, NASA Administrator“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected. But the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It’s decision making and leadership that if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”“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. I think setting the record straight, classifying as a type A mishap, ensures what happened here with this mission is appropriately recorded and can be referenced for future learning. This is how you course correct a culture.The U.S. space agency convened a short-notice news conference and released a 300-page report examining the technical and oversight failures behind Starliner’s first crewed flight in 2024, a high-profile mission that kept NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months for a test mission initially planned to last roughly a week.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 after the mission. 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.The report, which was completed in November, 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.

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