The new head of the POT attacked on Thursday against Boeing and the space agency for the failed Starliner flight that left two astronauts trapped for months in the International Space Station (ISS).
Administrator Jared Isaacman said the Starliner problems were due to poor leadership and decision-making at Boeing. He also blamed NASA officials for not intervening to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back more quickly.
The two test pilots, now retired from NASA, spent more than nine months on the station before returning to it with SpaceX last March.
Isaacman said the Starliner’s problems need to be better understood and fixed before more astronauts embark.
Isaacman raised the severity of the Starliner astronaut’s troubled debut, declaring it a “Type A mishap,” something that could endanger the crew. In both the Challenger disaster and the space shuttle Columbia disaster there were also cultural and leadership errors. It’s a mistake that the Starliner wasn’t designated a major mishap from the beginning, Isaacman said, citing internal pressure to keep Boeing on board and the flights going.
“It’s just about doing the right thing,” he said. “It’s about making things clear.”
Thruster failures and other problems nearly prevented Wilmore and Williams from reaching the space station after liftoff in 2024. Boeing continues to analyze the propellants.
“We were on the verge of having a really terrible day,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, referring to a possible loss of human life.
Boeing said the NASA report would help the company make progress in ensuring crew safety, and stressed that the Starliner program would continue.
There are no deadlines for Boeing to launch the Starliner on a supply flightessentially another test flight to demonstrate its safety before astronaut flights. The grounding leaves SpaceX as the only American taxi service for astronauts.
“Boeing has made substantial progress in corrective actions for the technical challenges we encountered and has driven significant cultural changes across the team,” Boeing said in a statement.
1/8 | Space operation: astronauts stranded in space begin their journey back to Earth. This image taken from a NASA video shows the SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore before undocking from the International Space Station. – The Associated Press
Even before the astronauts’ troubled flight, Boeing was struggling with Starliner problems. The first test flight in 2019, with no one on board, ended up in the wrong orbit and forced a repeat mission, which had its own difficulties.
NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, after the retirement of the space shuttles, to transport astronauts to and from the orbital laboratory. Their contracts amount to billions. SpaceX just sent its 13th crew to the space station for NASA since 2020.
Kshatriya stated that the space agency must improve in the future.
“We have to take our part in this,” he said. As for Wilmore and Williams, “we have failed them”.