Taken at face value, that sounds like a narrow program failure.
NASA's Commercial Crew Program was supposed to be the template: services-based procurement, private ownership of hardware and competition between providers. Yet NASA has now formally designated Boeing's 2024 Starliner crewed test flight as a Type A mishap — its most serious category — and leadership has been explicit that the most troubling failure was not hardware but decision-making and leadership.
The Starliner investigation, released Feb. 19, is a case study in treating "commercial" as a contract label rather than a behavior. A program can call itself commercial.
