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.

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Dan Garretson is the founder of CounterFlow Solutions. He previously managed space policy analysis at the Science and Technology Policy Institute.