The first astronaut mission of Boeing’s Starliner taxi was a bumpier ride than NASA wanted to admit at the time.
The agency announced today (Feb. 19) that it has reclassified Starliner‘s Crew Flight Test (CFT) as a “Type A mishap” — the most serious kind, in the same category as the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
CFT launched on June 5, 2024, sending NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station (ISS) for a planned 10-day stay.
Starliner reached the orbiting lab safely. On the way, however, the spacecraft suffered multiple thruster failures and temporarily lost “six degree of freedom” control — the ability to precisely maintain its desired orientation and trajectory.
“Flight rules were appropriately challenged, control was recovered and docking was achieved,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during today’s press conference, reading from a letter that he said he had just sent to all NASA employees.
But, he added, “it is worth restating what should be obvious: 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.”
NASA prolonged the orbital stay of Williams and Wilmore multiple times to study Starliner’s thruster issues. In the end, the agency decided to bring the capsule home uncrewed, which occurred on Sept. 6.
Starliner landed safely, but its departure was not entirely smooth. The spacecraft experienced “an unexpected crew module propulsion failure,” Isaacman said, and lacked “fault tolerance” in its thrusters throughout the reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.
Williams and Wilmore, meanwhile, stayed aboard the ISS. They came home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in March of this year, having spent about nine months in space instead of the originally planned 10 days. Both have since retired from the agency.
NASA recognizes five categories of mishap. From most to least serious, they are Type A, Type B, Type C and Type D, as well as “close calls.”
The dividing lines between them are clearly defined. For example, any incident that causes at least $2 million of damages or other unplanned mission costs, or involves unexpected “departure from controlled flight,” is a Type A mishap.
CFT clearly met those criteria, Isaacman said today. But NASA did not classify the mission as a Type A mishap during and shortly after CFT, apparently because agency officials were too focused on getting Starliner certified to fly operational astronaut missions to the ISS.
“Concern for the Starliner program’s reputation influenced that decision,” Isaacman said today. “Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable balance and placed the mission, the crew and America’s space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time decisions were being contemplated. This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again, and there will be leadership accountability.”
With CFT officially being designated a Type A mishap, he added, “the record is now being corrected.”
SpaceX has been carrying astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020. But NASA — and, more specifically, its Commercial Crew Program (CCP) — wants another private American astronaut taxi available to provide redundancy. Indeed, that has been the plan since 2014, when SpaceX and Boeing won astronaut-flying contracts from the CCP.
NASA chartered an independent team to investigate the CFT issues in February 2025. That group finished its report in November, and NASA recently released it to the public. And in the next week or so, Isaacman said, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel will brief Congress on CFT and the report’s findings.
But the investigation continues. NASA and Boeing are still working to figure out the root cause of Starliner’s thruster issues, and the vehicle won’t carry astronauts again until those problems have been fixed, Isaacman stressed. (The spacecraft is currently targeted to fly an uncrewed cargo mission to the ISS no earlier than this April, though an official launch date has not yet been set.)
The International Space Station’s days are numbered. It will be retired in 2030, dying a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere over the spacecraft graveyard known as Point Nemo.
So Starliner’s window to fly astronauts to the orbiting lab may end up being relatively short. But Isaacman sees broad utility for Starliner beyond the ISS’ lifetime.
“One of our top priorities here, in line with President Trump’s National Space Policy, is to ignite the orbital economy, which hopefully necessitates numerous commercial space stations in low Earth orbit,” he said. In that case, “America benefits by having multiple pathways to take our crew and cargo to orbit.”
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