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At a news conference on Thursday, NASA released a report of findings from the Program Investigation Team examining the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
“The Boeing Starliner spacecraft has faced challenges throughout its uncrewed and most recent crewed missions. While Boeing built Starliner, NASA accepted it and launched two astronauts to space. The technical difficulties encountered during docking with the International Space Station were very apparent,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
“To undertake missions that change the world, we must be transparent about both our successes and our shortcomings. We have to own our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. Beyond technical issues, it is clear that NASA permitted overarching programmatic objectives of having two providers capable of transporting astronauts to-and-from orbit, influence engineering and operational decisions, especially during and immediately after the mission. We are correcting those mistakes. Today, we are formally declaring a Type A mishap and ensuring leadership accountability so situations like this never reoccur. We look forward to working with Boeing as both organizations implement corrective actions and return Starliner to flight only when ready.”
Starliner launched June 5, 2024, on its first crewed test flight to the International Space Station. Originally planned as an eight-to-14-day mission, the flight was extended to 93 days after propulsion system anomalies were identified while the spacecraft was in orbit. After reviewing flight data and conducting ground test at White Sands Test Facility, NASA decided to return the spacecraft without NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Starliner returned from the space station in September 2024, landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. Wilmore and Williams later returned safely to Earth aboard the agency’s SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission in March 2025.
In February 2025, NASA chartered an independent Program Investigation Team to investigate the technical, organizational, and cultural contributors to the test flight issues.
This report was completed in November 2025. NASA and Boeing have been working together since Starliner returned 18 months ago to identify and address the challenges encountered during the mission, and the technical root cause work continues.
Investigators identified an interplay of combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns that created risk conditions inconsistent with NASA’s human spaceflight safety standards. NASA will accept this as the final report.
As a result, NASA is taking corrective actions to address the findings of the report, in an effort to ensure the lessons learned contribute to crew and mission safety of future Starliner flights and all NASA programs. Due to the loss of the spacecraft’s maneuverability as the crew approached the space station and the associated financial damages incurred, NASA has classified the test flight as a Type A mishap. While there were no injuries and the mission regained control prior to docking, this highest-level classification designation recognizes there was potential for a significant mishap.
NASA will continue to work closely with Boeing to fully understand and solve the technical challenges with the Starliner vehicle alongside incorporating the investigative recommendations before flying the next mission.
For the full report, which includes redactions in coordination with our commercial partner to protect proprietary and privacy-sensitive material is available online. A 508-compliant version of the report is forthcoming, and will be posted on this page. NASA will update with an editor’s note when complete.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/nasa-report-with-redactions-021926.pdf?emrc=76e561
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Bethany Stevens / Cheryl Warner
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov
2026-02-19 17:09
During a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday NASA will discuss the findings of investigations into the 2024 crewed test flight of Boeing Starliner to the International Space Station.
The news conference will stream live on NASA’s YouTube channel. An instant replay will be available online.
NASA participants include:
To ask questions during the news conference, media must RSVP no later than 30 minutes prior to the start of the call to the NASA Headquarters newsroom at: hq-media@mail.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
For NASA’s blog and more information about the mission, visit:
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Bethany Stevens / Cheryl Warner
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov
2026-02-19 16:31

Imagine trying to photograph wind. That’s similar to what NASA engineers dealt with during a recent effort to study how air moves around planes, rockets, and other kinds of aerospace vehicles. Air is invisible, but our understanding of how it flows is crucial for building better, safer aircraft.
For 80 years, researchers used a technique called “focused schlieren imaging.” Think of it as a special camera system that can “see” air movement by detecting tiny changes in its density. It’s the same effect that lets you to see heat waves rising from hot pavement on a sunny day — just much more precise.
The Self-Aligned Focusing Schlieren (SAFS) system is a game-changer. It’s a compact, low-cost, easy-to-use visualization tool that is less complex than traditional focusing schlieren systems.
“What makes this breakthrough compelling is the ripple effect,” said NASA’s Brett Bathel, who invented the SAFS alongside fellow engineer Joshua Weisberger at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “When researchers can see and understand air movement in ways that were previously difficult to achieve, it leads to better aircraft designs and safer flights for everyone.”

Switching from older systems to SAFS in wind tunnels and other specialized research environments allows aerospace engineers to gather high-speed flow visualization data more efficiently, with less facility downtime, and lower costs. For the aviation industry, it opens doors to new discoveries, potentially revolutionizing how we design everything from commercial airliners to spacecraft.
With SAFS in its toolbox, NASA is also better positioned to meet its mission goals related to efficiency and safety in aviation and space. Researchers are using SAFS to capture flow separation on the High Lift Common Research Model, a tool for improving how accurately we can predict the takeoff and landing performance of new aircraft. And it’s helping them investigate shock cell structures — diamond shapes that form in exhaust plumes — for the Space Launch System model.
The NASA technology is already being used worldwide, adopted by over 50 institutions in more than 8 countries, from Notre Dame to the University of Liverpool. Companies continue to license the technology and commercial versions are hitting the market.
The impact has been so significant that NASA’s researchers earned multiple awards. R&D World gave SAFS a spot on its 2025 R&D 100 Awards, selected by a panel of global experts.
NASA also named the SAFS a 2025 NASA Government Invention of the Year, the highest award the agency gives to groundbreaking technologies.
To understand why the SAFS is a big deal, you need to know what researchers were working with before.
The older focused schlieren imaging setup required researchers to have access to both sides of what they were testing. They needed to set up separate grids of light sources on each side and align them perfectly with each other. It’s the equivalent of lining up two window screens on opposite sides of a room so their patterns match exactly.
Setting up one of these systems could take weeks of painstaking adjustments, and if someone accidentally bumped the system or needed to make an adjustment? Start over.
Enter the SAFS system. In 2020, NASA researchers asked a critical question: What would happen if they could eliminate all that complexity by using the properties of light itself?
The solution? Light polarization. Your polarized sunglasses work by filtering light in specific directions. The SAFS system does something similar, using light polarization to create the same effect as the older, cumbersome dual-grid setup. The SAFS system only requires access to one side of the object you’re testing. And, instead of needing two separate grids that must be perfectly aligned, it uses just one grid that does double duty.
What used to take weeks of setup now takes just minutes. Need to make adjustments? No problem. The SAFS system can tweak sensitivity, change its field of view, or adjust focus on the fly. The system is compact and immune to vibrations (goodbye, starting-over-because-someone-walked-by).
Sometimes revolutionary advances come not from adding complexity, but from finding new creative solutions to age-old problems. The SAFS is proof that there’s always room for innovation — and this one is already making its mark on the world.
The work on SAFS was supported through NASA’s Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities portfolio office and Transformational Tools and Technologies project, which works to develop new computational tools to help predict aircraft performance. The project is part of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program under its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.
2026-02-19 16:12
This June 5, 2024, image shows lysozyme crystals aboard the International Space Station. Lysozyme is a protein found in bodily fluids like tears, saliva, and milk, and is used as a control compound to demonstrate well-formed crystals. Lysozyme plays a vital role in innate immunity, protecting against bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The crystals were grown with Redwire’s PIL-BOX in a study of the effect of microgravity on various types of crystals production.
Image credit: Redwire
2026-02-19 14:28
2 min read
A stream of charged particles known as the solar wind flows from the Sun toward Earth. Here, it meets the Earth’s magnetic fields, which shield our planet like a giant umbrella. The Space Umbrella project needs your help investigating this dynamic region, where NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission has been collecting data since 2015. The MMS mission investigates how the Sun and Earth’s magnetic fields connect and disconnect, explosively transferring energy from one to the other in a process that is important to the Sun, other planets, and everywhere in the universe.
With the Space Umbrella project, you will help identify when the MMS spacecraft has observed the strongest interactions between the Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind. While these interactions can result in beautiful auroras, they also release energy that could disrupt GPS and communications systems and endanger astronauts. Your work will also help scientists better understand solar storms. Understanding these solar storms can contribute to keeping our astronauts and technology safe.
To get started, visit the Space Umbrella project website and complete the tutorial. The tutorial will teach you everything you need to know, including how to tell when the satellite is inside Earth’s magnetic field and when the magnetosphere is interacting with the Sun’s particles. Everyone is welcome to participate — no prior experience needed!

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