WASHINGTON: Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman on Thursday ripped into Boeing and agency leadership for their handling of the botched Starliner spacecraft mission that left two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station for nearly a year.
The US 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 ISS for nine months for a test mission initially planned to last roughly a week.
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in a letter to Nasa employees, which he posted in full on X.