NASA's Watchdog Questions $170.9 Million Paid to Boeing

In 2014, NASA made a bet: pay two companies fixed prices to build and fly their own crew capsules, and the competition between them would deliver safe, reliable astronaut transport for less than owning the vehicles outright.▸ Twelve years and $9.8 billion later, that bet has one working half. SpaceX's Crew Dragon has flown 12 crewed missions since 2020. Boeing's Starliner has flown three flight tests and is still not certified to carry astronauts -- and a NASA Office of Inspector General audit released June 30, 2026⧉ found the agency has already advanced $127.9 million toward a Starliner flight it calls "far from certain," on top of $43 million questioned in a prior audit.

NASA's pitch for the Commercial Crew Program was straightforward: after the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, NASA had relied solely on Russia's Soyuz -- 68 seats, over $3.6 billion, between 2006 and 2024 -- to get astronauts to the ISS.▸ In 2014, NASA awarded fixed-price contracts to SpaceX for $2.6 billion and Boeing for $4.2 billion, a combined $6.8 billion, with both providers expected to be flying certified crew missions by 2017.

As of April 2026, NASA's total investment across both contracts and direct program funding had grown to $9.8 billion -- 44% above the original combined award.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon received human-rating certification in November 2020 and has flown routine crewed missions since.▸ Boeing's Starliner has run three flight tests, and each slipped further from its original schedule than the last: the first uncrewed test launched 2.7 years late, the second 1.4 years late, and the first crewed test -- CFT, in June 2024 -- launched 6.9 years after its original schedule.

During CFT, five service-module thrusters overheated and failed, and Commander Butch Wilmore was forced to take manual control after the vehicle lost six degrees of freedom of automated control -- a loss of control NASA's own investigators called nearly catastrophic.▸ What was meant to be an 8-day mission for Wilmore and fellow astronaut Suni Williams became a 286-day stay on the station while NASA and Boeing worked the problem.

This is not the first time NASA's inspector general has flagged money moving ahead of results.▸ In 2018, NASA added $287 million to Boeing's contract to help it stay on a schedule that, in hindsight, was never realistic, and authorized both providers to bill for a third post-certification mission years before either had completed a successful flight test. A 2019 NASA OIG audit questioned $43 million of Boeing's Starliner-3 milestone payments made earlier than the contract required.

The new audit adds to that figure rather than closing it: since 2019, NASA OIG now questions an additional $127.9 million in Boeing milestone payments for Starliner-3 -- "a flight that is far from certain."▸ NASA also paid SpaceX an extra $17 million to accelerate two flights on a compressed schedule after Boeing could not fly missions originally assigned to it.

NASA's own procedural requirements call for the agency's most severe classification -- the one used for the Challenger and Columbia disasters -- whenever a mission fails to meet its main objectives, including a failure to return crew to Earth as planned.▸ CFT lost automated control before docking, a core objective it failed to meet. Yet NASA did not classify the mission as a Type A mishap until February 2026 -- 21 months after it occurred, a delay the inspector general found let ambiguity in NASA's own mishap-reporting rules stall a formal investigation timeline. The agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel had already flagged that same ambiguity as a problem before CFT ever flew.

NASA officials had projected certification by fall 2026; the inspector general found that timeline unrealistic and expects a delay to 2027 -- three years before the ISS is due to be decommissioned in 2030.▸ Rather than risk a crew on a vehicle with unresolved helium leaks and thruster failures, NASA will fly the next mission, Starliner-1, uncrewed and carrying only cargo.

That decision uses one of Boeing's contracted crew missions -- worth over $300 million -- to run what is effectively a third uncrewed test flight, meaning NASA will now need to buy at least one additional crewed flight from either provider just to keep the station staffed through decommissioning.▸ Meanwhile, the Commercial Crew Program itself has lost about 21% of its workforce to attrition and reorganization as of April 2025, at the exact moment the program needs the staff to manage two providers instead of coasting on one that already works.

NASA's inspector general made six recommendations, starting with the most direct one: defer any further Starliner-3 milestone payments to Boeing, including partial or advance payments, until human-rating certification is actually complete.▸ NASA management concurred with all six recommendations and described planned corrective actions; the inspector general considers them resolved but not yet closed, meaning the fix is agreed to on paper and still owed in practice, pending verification that NASA actually holds the next Starliner-3 payment until Boeing earns certification.