NASA Probe Finds Boeing's Starliner Woes Rooted in Overconfidence, Unrealistic Schedules, and a Touch of Hubris

WASHINGTON - A new report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General, released June 30, suggests that Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle has been plagued not just by technical glitches, but by a potent cocktail of overconfidence, unrealistic schedules, and NASA’s surprising lack of insight into the spacecraft. The report adds to the uncertainty about when Starliner will be approved for crewed missions to the International Space Station, despite the sunny optimism from Boeing’s chief executive.

Starliner hasn’t flown since its Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission two years ago, which ended with thruster malfunctions and other issues that forced NASA to send the spacecraft back to Earth without a crew. The astronauts who flew on Starliner to the ISS had to wait until March 2025 for a ride home on a Crew Dragon. The OIG report identified three underlying causes for the problems with that mission and two previous uncrewed test flights.

First, NASA was “overconfident in Boeing’s design and potential success based on the provider’s use of heritage systems and its long-standing spaceflight experience,” the report stated, noting that NASA allowed Boeing to skip integrated testing of those systems. Second, this overconfidence led to Boeing establishing, and NASA accepting, “an unrealistic launch and flight-test schedule.” The commercial crew program “consistently operated as if Starliner’s CFT mission was only 6 months away” starting in May 2021, though the mission didn’t launch until June 2024. Those schedules, the report argued, affected work on vehicle systems and testing.

Third, NASA lacked access to Starliner flight simulator data. Access was limited by the contract between NASA and Boeing, but OIG said NASA didn’t take advantage of the data that was available before the CFT mission, including simulation runs that resulted in loss of vehicle or crew. “The CFT crew noted this was unlike the shuttle era, when simulation failures resulted in full and open investigations, with reporting to its crews,” the report stated.

Exacerbating these issues is a lack of personnel: the commercial crew program office lost 21% of its staff to attrition and reorganizations as of April 2025, and the office was uncertain whether it could continue to access staff from other parts of the agency that had helped review vehicle safety. OIG noted NASA has taken action but criticized the agency for waiting until February, more than a year and a half after the CFT launch, to formally classify it as a “Type A” mishap - and only after an independent review recommended it.

“In our judgment, the 21-month delay in failing to classify the CFT mission as a Type A mishap continues to delay resolution of Starliner issues that have persisted across three flight tests since 2019, further compounding costly delays in obtaining certification and limiting NASA’s options for crew transportation,” the report stated.

The report highlights uncertainty about when Starliner will fly again and whether it will be certified for ISS crew rotation missions before the ISS retires in 2030. “In the near term, given the continued challenges, we have concerns that all three of Boeing’s authorized flights will not be flown by 2030,” the report stated, referring to the three crewed Starliner flights Boeing is under contract to perform. Those will come after Starliner-1, originally planned as a crewed flight but converted into a cargo-only mission last year. That mission has not been scheduled, though NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said at a June 22 meeting that Starliner-1 would fly “in the next year or so” without offering a more specific timetable.

That uncertainty contrasts with the optimism Boeing Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg offered in an interview with Aviation Week published June 25. “We’ve made most of the corrective actions that came out of the prior flight test,” he said. “It is still our plan to have additional launches. NASA is working through that schedule. It looks like there might be one launch this year instead of two.” Early this year, NASA officials left open the possibility of a crewed Starliner mission late this year, assuming Starliner-1 would fly as soon as April. The independent report in February made it clear that schedule wouldn’t hold.

“While NASA officials have noted fall 2026 as the likely time frame for Starliner’s certification, we found this to be unrealistic given the current delays for the Starliner-1 launch and lack of clarity on the progress this uncrewed cargo flight will accomplish on Starliner’s certification plan,” the OIG report stated, concluding certification would likely slip to 2027.

Ortberg said he felt more confident about Starliner’s future than a year ago, but both the OIG report and the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel stated that some of the most serious problems from the CFT mission, such as thruster failures and heating of the “doghouses” on the Starliner service module, had not been resolved. “A Starliner-1 launch date is not currently scheduled, as NASA continues to evaluate launch opportunities,” the OIG report stated. “However, test results and analysis related to helium leaks and propulsion systems failures have not yet been completed as of March 2026, and NASA is uncertain as to when this testing will be completed or human-rating certification for the Starliner will be obtained.”