NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight
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Place your bets, because it looks increasingly unlikely Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will carry astronauts again, if a NASA inspector general's report is anything to go on.
Published on Tuesday, the OIG report on NASA's management of its Commercial Crew Program (CCP) examines how SpaceX and Boeing have performed in providing crew transportation to the International Space Station. The report notes that SpaceX worked through its own technical challenges getting humans into space and to the ISS.
Boeing’s Starliner, a.k.a. the Calamity Capsule, on the other hand, featured extensively in the writeup, with the OIG calling into question whether it’ll ever get past the testing phase.
“Boeing has been unable to obtain human-rating certification for its Starliner capsule and Atlas V launch vehicle, conducting two orbital flight tests and one crewed flight test that suffered significant issues and was ultimately classified as a serious mishap,” the OIG report said. “With over 11 years invested and about 4 years of crewed operations aboard the ISS remaining until the Station’s planned decommission in 2030, NASA and Boeing have limited time and resources to realize the value of their significant investments into Starliner.”
The saga of Boeing’s Starliner has been one of repeated failures and budget overruns, both at NASA and Boeing, thanks to the capsule’s disastrous launch record.
As the NASA OIG noted in its report, Starliner has flown three test missions, one with crew, and each encountered significant technical problems.
The first flight, in 2019, failed to reach the ISS because a software-related mission timing error caused an incorrect orbital insertion burn, preventing the spacecraft from docking. Problems with stuck oxidizer valves discovered ahead of a planned 2021 launch delayed the second orbital flight test until May 2022, when Starliner successfully reached the ISS despite experiencing thruster failures and helium leaks.
NASA budget constraints rear their heads in Moon rover plan
In other NASA news, the agency announced some new commercial Moon landing plans Tuesday that included a truly oddball idea: Sending an engineering development model of a Mars rover to the Moon instead of a purpose-built one.
The rover, which currently lives at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and serves as a testbed for Curiosity and Perseverance, could be repurposed as the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, or PROMISE, if Isaacman gets his way.
The move would mean that a rover that was never meant for actual space exploration would be doing just that, and it’d also mean that JPL was left without its engineering model for two active rovers on Mars. NASA didn’t respond to questions about the plan.
NASA was going to get a pair of astronauts up in the craft in 2023, but that didn’t happen after a series of issues were discovered, including a faulty parachute system and flammability risks associated with tape used to protect internal wiring.
The one crewed mission that Starliner attempted was also a disaster. No one was injured or killed in the incident, but NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stranded on the ISS for months after NASA determined the craft wasn’t safe enough to return its crew to Earth.
According to the OIG, it’s the parachute problems, along with persistent helium leaks and the aforementioned propulsion system failures, that are making it question whether Starliner is fit for purpose.
“The helium leaks and propulsion systems failures remain unresolved 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,” the report states.
The OIG placed the blame on both NASA and Boeing for the problems, similarly to what NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said earlier this year when he accepted that his agency was part of the reason the whole thing had gone so badly.
Per the OIG, NASA contributed to the problem by being “overconfident in Boeing’s design and potential success based on the provider’s use of heritage systems,” which led to the space agency setting “unrealistic launch and flight test schedules.”
“The pressure to adhere to this aggressive schedule was compounded by NASA’s underutilization of the contract’s data rights, limiting the Agency’s ability to fully analyze and resolve flight simulation training failures to ensure crew safety,” the report continued. Staffing constraints driven by the Trump administration’s desire to cut costs wherever it can find them are likely to further hinder oversight, the OIG said, calling into question once more whether the Calamity Capsule will ever fly again and whether it's worth the cost.
“We question $127.9 million in payments to Boeing, in addition to the $43 million we questioned in a prior 2019 CCP-related report, for a mission that is far from certain,” the OIG said.
In other words, if you want to trim some NASA fat, the Starliner budget’s a perfect place to do it. ®
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