On Thursday, NASA released sobering results from an independent investigation into the 2024 crewed Boeing Starliner test flight that left two astronauts stranded in space for months, placing blame not only on hardware failures, but the agency’s own leadership and culture.
In a press conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency had now categorized the incident as a type A mishap — the same classification applied to the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters — something he believes should have happened from the start.
What happened
The Starliner Crewed Flight Test launched June 5, 2024, on what was supposed to be an eight-to-14-day mission. During rendezvous with the ISS, several thrusters failed and the vehicle — which was supposed to dock autonomously — temporarily lost control. Controllers and crew were able to recover the craft and successfully dock with the station, but the spacecraft’s problems kept astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on the ISS for 93 days. Starliner returned to Earth autonomously in September 2024, and the astronauts came home aboard SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission in March 2025.
Isaacman emphasized that the consequences of the thruster failures could have been far worse. “At that moment, had different decisions been made, had thrusters not been recovered, or had docking been unsuccessful, the outcome of this mission could have been very very different,” he said.
Starliner’s troubles predated the crewed mission — both of its earlier uncrewed test flights experienced thruster failures and propulsion issues. But Isaacman said prior investigations “stopped short of the proximate or the direct cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly.”
What the investigation found
During the press conference, Isaacman walked reporters through the findings of the independent investigation that NASA chartered in February 2025 and that was completed in November, characterizing its conclusions as evidence of failures stretching back to the program’s earliest days.
The report identified three root causes: First, NASA’s approach to managing Boeing was too hands off and “left the agency without the systems knowledge … required to confidently certify a human-rated spacecraft,” Isaacman said. Second, Boeing’s propulsion design “allowed hardware to operate outside qualification limits,” putting crew safety at risk. And third, the agency’s desire to preserve two crew transportation providers (SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner) colored their assessment of risks associated with Starliner.
Isaacman broke down the failures across three phases of the mission. Before launch, he said the thruster risks flagged during earlier flights were never fully understood and fixes were incomplete. Witness statements, he added, reflected a belief within program management that the agency’s commercial crew program, which partners with private aerospace companies (like SpaceX and Boeing) to transport astronauts to the ISS, “could only succeed if Starliner launched.”
While the crew was on orbit, conversations over how to bring them home turned nasty. Isaacman said discourse “deteriorated into unprofessional conduct” as some participants continued to push for Starliner’s viability rather than focusing on safety. The investigation’s interviews bore that out with one witness calling it “probably the ugliest environment that I’ve been in,” while others described yelling in meetings, safety engineers being berated on muted mics, and a climate where dissenting views were ignored.
“The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman said. “It’s decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
What is a type A mishap?
Isaacman stressed that the type A designation is a standard classification used across the federal government, triggered by either loss of life or more than $2 million in damages.
In the immediate aftermath of the Starliner mission, NASA did not initially classify the event as a mishap, even though costs exceeded the type A threshold by a factor of more than 100. Isaacman attributed that decision to concern over the program’s reputation.
He noted the same label applies to events as varied as a recent WB-57 aircraft landing without its landing gear deployed and the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, and said comparing Starliner’s situation to those tragedies in severity would be inaccurate.
In response to a reporter’s question, Isaacman reiterated that placing Starliner in the same category as the shuttle disasters is not drawing an equivalence between them — the designation is defined by a damage threshold in dollars. What matters is what the classification triggers; in NASA’s case, a type A designation requires an independent investigation and administrator-level attention. “I don’t think there is anything that is flawed about that process,” he said.
What comes next?
Isaacman framed the announcement as an exercise in transparency, saying NASA must own its mistakes to prevent them from recurring. He said there would be leadership accountability and that NASA is rebuilding its in-house engineering expertise — what he described as shifting from a posture of seeking “insight” into contractors’ work toward more hands-on “oversight.”
That includes converting contractor positions back to civil servant roles, which Isaacman said is aimed at “regaining some lost muscle memory on our engineering skills.” NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner “until technical causes are understood and corrected, the propulsion system is fully qualified and appropriate investigation recommendations are implemented,” he said.
As for the future of NASA’s commercial crew program, Isaacman pushed back on the notion that commercial contracts are inherently risky, noting that private industry has supported NASA’s missions since the Apollo era. He said America benefits from multiple pathways to orbit and expressed confidence Boeing will remain a partner.
Where Isaacman was blunt and matter-of-fact in laying out NASA’s failures, Associate Administrator Amit Shtria struck a more personal tone in his closing remarks. He called NASA “a family” and shared stories of his decades-long friendships with both astronauts — recalling how Wilmore once called him on his first shift as flight director just to joke that “it looks like they’ll let anybody run this place,” and how Williams always made a point to take selfies with him to send to his mother.
But his voice carried weight when he turned to accountability. “We failed them,” he said of the two astronauts. “And even though they won’t say that, we have to say that.” He urged the NASA workforce to see the announcement not as finger-pointing but as a model for the kind of honest self-examination the agency needs — before, not after, the worst happens.
