NASA has replaced two bigwigs in its human spaceflight program, just a week after the release of a report that found serious flaws with how the first manned flight of Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi was handled.
The agency announced today (February 26) that Joel Montalbano and Dana Hutcherson will serve as acting assistant administrators for the Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) and acting program managers for Commercial Crew Program (CCP), respectively. They will both take responsibility immediately.
“Strong leadership is critical to advancing NASA’s mission, and Joel Montalbano and Dana Hutcherson are exceptionally well qualified to serve in these acting roles,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in one statement today. “Their experience and commitment will help ensure that we deliver on the president’s national space policy, sustaining American leadership in low earth orbitand build the qualities required to achieve the near-impossible beyond that.”
SOMD encompasses a wide variety of programs and activities, including CCP The International Space Station (ISS) program, the Human Spaceflight Capabilities and the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Program, which advance the development of private successors to the ISS. Montalbano takes over from Ken Bowersox, who announced Wednesday (February 25) that he is retiring from NASA. That retirement is effective March 6, according to today’s statement.
The CCP funds and oversees flights of NASA astronauts to and from the ISS aboard private spacecraft—namely, SpaceX‘s Crew Dragon capsule and Boeing’s Starliner. The program was previously led by Steve Stich, who will remain at NASA as an adviser to the Human Landing System (HLS) Program, agency officials told Space.com via email.
(HLS is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop manned lunar landers for the agency’s The Artemis program. SpaceX will put astronauts on the surface of the moon for the first time Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 missions, and Boeing will do so on Artemis 5, if all goes according to plan.)
SpaceX has flown NASA astronauts to and from the ISS since May 2020. Boeing did it for the first time in June 2024, in a two-person test run called the Crew Flight Test (CFT).
The CFT turned out to be quite a bumpy ride: the Starliner suffered thruster error and other problems on the way to the ISS, and NASA decided to bring the capsule home without a crew in September 2024. The two CFT astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, ended up staying aboard the station for nine months instead of the originally planned 10 days, eventually returning home on a Crew Dragon in March 2025.
Last Thursday (February 19), NASA announced the highlights of a report on the CFT and its problems. The report reclassified the aircraft as a “Type A accident” — same category as the space shuttle Challenging and Columbia tragedies. And that call should have been made in real time or shortly after, according to Isaacman.
“Concern about the reputation of the Starliner program influenced that decision,” he said on February 19. “Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable balance and jeopardized the mission, the crew, and the US space program in ways that were not fully understood at the time decisions were considered. This created a culture of distrust that will never happen again, and there.”
Today’s staffing announcement does not mention Starliner or the CFT, and NASA officials did not address the topic when asked by email by Space.com whether the shakeup is related to the report and its findings. But the timing and nature of the changes suggest we are likely to see the “leadership accountability” that Isaacman promised.
Both Montalbano and Hutcherson are experienced and decorated NASA executives.
Montalbano’s previous jobs include NASA flight director, program manager for the International Space Station at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and director of NASA’s Human Space Flight Program in Russia.
Hutcherson’s previous NASA roles include deputy director of CCP’s Systems Engineering and Integration Office and deputy director of the program’s Launch Vehicle Systems Office. Both she and Montalbano have won multiple NASA leadership awards, according to the agency’s statement today.
