A meeting this week of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which oversees Starliner, ended with some officials disagreeing with a plan to accept Boeing's testing data and use Starliner to bring the astronauts home, officials said during a news conference.

"We didn't poll in a way that led to a conclusion," Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich said.

"We heard from a lot of folks that had concerns, and the decision was not clear," Ken Bowersox, NASA's space operations chief, added.

My jaw literally dropped at this. This is NASA-speak for "We want it publicly known that we think the contractor is incompetent, and no-one here is going to stick their neck out for them, and we're not going to name names of our own people for the contractor to retaliate against." I can't remember ever seeing an actively-employed NASA official going on the record and saying this about a big longstanding contractor involved in multiple current projects. This is language normally reserved for little cubesat makers that screw up a contract. This is unheard of for a big one like Boeing.

A Boeing executive was not at the Wednesday press conference.

Yeah, no kidding. No crew return on the same vehicle means no certification for operational flights. No certification means another test flight. And because it's a fixed-price contract a new test flight will be at Boeing's sole expense. It will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars more of Boeing's own cash, maybe closer to half a billion. And all because they wanted to build spacecraft on the cheap mostly using computer simulations, instead of building real hardware to put on real test stands.

You know how sometimes a real shithead gets appointed to a high office, and despite them not having anything to do with causing a particular problem, it's a lot of fun watching them get politically fucked over because a major fuckup occurred when they happen to be occupying that office? Well, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is that shithead here. While he was in Congress in 1986, he used his connections to bump a mission specialist from a shuttle mission just for his own ego. NASA's astronaut corp gave him the nickname "Ballast" because he was absolutely useless on the flight. He was dead weight. His appointment as Administrator by Joe Biden in 2021 was highly controversial in the astronaut corp because of that.