A review of the troubled Starliner mission in 2024 has classified the spacecraft’s first manned flight as a “Type A mishap,” a category that includes the most serious unplanned events that pose a threat to life.
While approaching the International Space Station (ISS) a little over two years ago, the spacecraft experienced problems with its engines and briefly lost the ability to orient itself safely.
After they managed to dock, the two astronauts aboard the Starliner, NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, expected to return home ten days later. However, after the engineers failed to solve the problem, they decided, out of an abundance of caution, to bring the Starliner home empty. Williams and Wilmore ended up staying on the ISS for about nine months before returning to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
NASA’s Program Investigation Team (PIT), an independent group formed by the space agency about a year ago, publicly released its report on the incident on Thursday, calling the troubled Starliner mission a “Type A mishap.” This is the agency’s most serious classification and puts the Starliner flight in the same category as the Challenger space shuttle mission and the Columbia mission, both of which suffered catastrophic failures.
At a news conference Thursday, NASA Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya described the Starliner mission as “a really challenging event in our recent history,” adding, “We almost had a really terrible day.”
Recently appointed NASA chief Jared Isaacman also said at the press conference that the Starliner “has design and engineering deficiencies that must be addressed,” but added that “the most concerning flaw uncovered by this investigation is not the hardware. It is the decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
Isaacman said the spacecraft will no longer carry crew “until the technical causes are understood and resolved, the propulsion system is fully qualified and appropriate investigation recommendations are implemented.” In the meantime, NASA will continue to rely on SpaceX for crewed flights to and from the ISS.
In sections that make for uncomfortable reading, the PIT report includes comments from unnamed people who worked on the Starliner, such as: “There was shouting in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive.” Another comment said: “If you didn’t agree with the desired result your post would be filtered out or discarded,” while another said: “That was probably the ugliest environment I’ve ever been in.”
Isaacman promised that the PIT report would be taken seriously, adding that “there will be accountability.”
In response to the report, Boeing said in a statement on its website: “In the 18 months since our test flight, Boeing has made significant progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the report’s findings.”
“NASA’s report will reinforce our ongoing efforts to strengthen our work and the work of all commercial crew partners in support of the mission and crew safety, which is and must always be our top priority.”
NASA and Boeing amended their commercial crew contract last November, announcing that an uncrewed Starliner cargo mission would take place no earlier than April of this year, followed by up to three crewed rotations before the ISS is decommissioned in 2030. However, there is also the possibility that the Starliner will never fly again.
