NASA on Thursday (Feb. 19, 2026) released a sweeping report on Boeing’s botched Starliner mission that left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for nearly a year, detailing communication breakdowns and “unprofessional behavior” as the agency struggles to agree to a long-term deal.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman tore into Boeing and the agency’s leadership for managing the Starliner mission during a short-notice news conference that coincided with the release of a 300-page report detailing technical and oversight failures behind the spacecraft’s first crewed mission that ended last year.
“Starliner design and engineering flaws must be corrected, but the most problematic failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in a letter to NASA employees, which he posted in full on X.
“This decision-making and leadership, if left unchecked, can create a culture hostile to human spaceflight,” he said, echoing findings in the report’s “Cultural and Institutional” section.
A high-stakes test mission that kept NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the ISS for nine months was originally planned to last about a week because of Starliner’s technical failures.
On Earth, according to the report, Boeing and NASA officials erupted in tense meetings over how to get crews home, with “unprofessional behavior” and matches that defied agency rules of healthy technical debate and crisis management.
The report, completed in November and citing interviews with unnamed ‘NASA officials, said several interviewees cited defensive, unhealthy, controversial meetings during technical disagreements at the start of the mission.
“There was yelling in the meetings. It was emotional and unproductive,” one official reported. “This is probably the ugliest environment I’ve ever been in,” said another.
“There was no clear path to conflict resolution between the teams. It led to a lot of strained relationships and emotions,” said another.
The report also describes a “fragile partnership dynamic” between NASA and Boeing, in which engineering challenges and agency officials’ concerns that Boeing could exit NASA’s commercial crew program over agency standards influenced officials’ decision-making on critical mission issues.
“This reluctance to challenge Boeing’s explanations and failure to act on engineering issues contributed to risk acceptance and a fragile partnership dynamic.”
Boeing said in a statement that it is “grateful for NASA’s comprehensive research and the opportunity to contribute to it.” The company made progress in solving Starliner’s technical problems and made organizational changes.
NASA classified the Starliner mission as a “Type A” accident, the agency’s most serious mission failure, caused by more than $2 million in damage to the spacecraft or crew death or permanent disability.
Boeing has spent tens of millions of dollars repairing the Starliner following the mission, about $2 billion in charges the company has taken so far on the program since 2016.
The total value of Boeing’s NASA contract has increased by roughly $300 million to $4.5 billion since the 2014 award, including $2.2 billion of the total amount paid to Boeing so far for development failures and additional testing.
But NASA last year cut the total value of the contract to $3.7 billion and reduced the number of planned Starliner flights from six to four, as Boeing’s engineering inches closer to 2030, the planned retirement of the ISS.
Wilmore and Williams, experienced test pilots and astronauts, returned safely to Earth last year in a SpaceX craft after their faulty Starliner capsule returned empty.
“First and foremost, we’re trying to send a message about the right and wrong way to handle situations like this so they don’t happen again,” Isaacman told reporters.
The report also lists four previously known technical anomalies that led to the mission-failure condition, including Starliner’s propulsion system glitches that complicated its ability to dock with the ISS in the first hours of its mission.
