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Yesterday, NASA Admin Jared Isaacman dropped a bombshell at the Starliner briefing in that the 2024 Crew Flight Test was being reclassified officially as a Type A mishap (basically NASA’s highest severity classification).
Jared slammed leadership failures at NASA & Boeing: “The most troubling failure… is not hardware. It’s decision making and leadership that could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
This hits hard while I’m reading “Organizational Learning at NASA” by Julianne G. Mahler, the book that dissects those exact “Failure to Learn” patterns from Challenger to Columbia.
Mahler warned that without deep cultural/institutional change, NASA repeats history.
Yesterday’s briefing feels like a strong leadership attempt to change the culture at NASA - prioritizing crew safety over unrealistic timelines and contractor reputation.
Jared is embodying “extreme ownership,” transparency, bringing leadership accountability, and a hardline stance about not putting people back onboard until they figure out the true root causes and fix them.
In my personal view as a leadership expert (yes I have earned that), given his performance so far, is that Jared is 10 out of 10 the right guy for the job. He is doing a phenomenal job, bringing integrity and openness to the position. Not only does he embody adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 1994) but is also actively cultivating psychological safety (Edmonton, 1999) within NASA.
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For the nerds that want more: here were the key points from Mahler’s book (and how I think it relates to Starliner.)
The Challenger and Columbia accidents had different technical causes but very similar organizational and management failures. All of which echoed for Starliner.
- In both shuttle cases, early warning signs of problems were noticed but dismissed as “acceptable.” (For Starliner Jared mentions that “The investigations often stopped short of the proximate or the direct cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an UNEXPLAINED ANOMALY”. What!?! And they let humans onboard!?!”)
- Decision-makers during the shuttle disasters were isolated, under launch pressure, ignored engineers, and avoided openly discussing risks. (Root causes for Starliner issues were not always fully addressed, and I’m sure there was pressure in getting CFT underway given how very far behind SpaceX they were).
- Sally Ride saw clear “echoes” of Challenger in Columbia. (Here we were repeating history again - kudos to Jared for breaking the cycle!)
- NASA received safety warnings multiple times prior to the shuttle incidents but didn’t take them seriously. (NASA received multiple prior safety warnings about Starliner’s propulsion anomalies from earlier uncrewed tests. These were not taken seriously enough, patched, accepted as unexplained, or left without a root cause. This allowed the issues to persist and escalate during CFT).
- The Columbia board concluded NASA was NOT a learning organization and lacked institutional memory. (A warning that Jared echoed “Pretending unpleasant situations did not occur teaches the wrong lessons. Failure to learn invites failure again and suggests that in human spaceflight, failure is an option. It is not.” - great Kranz reference btw)
- Many of the same cultural and organizational issues that led to Challenger also contributed to Columbia.
(Yesterday Jared echoed the same sentiment “Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It’s decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.” A warning if I ever heard one.)
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