Bowersox to retire from NASA

Updated 2:30 p.m. Eastern with commercial crew program changes and timing.

HOUSTON — Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, is retiring from the agency less than a week after the release of a report critical of NASA’s handling of the Starliner crewed test flight.

At the end of a keynote at the ASCENDxTexas conference here Feb. 25, Bowersox said he is leaving the agency and will be replaced by his deputy, Joel Montalbano.

He didn’t give a reason or a timetable for his retirement but suggested it was imminent. “Ordinarily, this would be the point where I would encourage you to send me your questions, your comments, your ideas, except I have decided to retire,” he said. “If you were to send me an email, I probably wouldn’t get it.”

In a Feb. 26 statement, NASA said Bowersox would retire effective March 6, but that Montalbano would take over on an acting basis immediately.

Bowersox has been associate administrator for space operations since May 2023 after the retirement of Kathy Lueders. He had been deputy associate administrator for space operations and, before that, human exploration and operations for several years.

He is a former naval aviator and astronaut who flew four shuttle missions from 1992 to 1997 and a long-duration ISS mission, launching on a shuttle in 2002 and returning on a Soyuz in 2003 after the Columbia accident grounded the shuttle program. He was vice president of astronaut safety and mission assurance at SpaceX from 2009 to 2011 and later served as chair of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee before returning to NASA.

Bowersox said last July that he had decided not to participate in early retirement programs that resulted in departures of about 20% of the agency’s civil servant workforce. “Although I’m getting close to that age, so nobody should be surprised when it happens,” he said of retirement.

The Space Operations Mission Directorate oversees operations of the International Space Station as well as the Commercial Crew Program. It also handles some supporting functions, like launch services and communications.

Bowersox’s announcement comes less than a week after NASA released an independent report into the Boeing CST-100 Starliner crewed test flight in 2024. That mission suffered technical problems that led NASA to return the spacecraft uncrewed, forcing the astronauts who flew to the ISS on it to remain there for months until they could come home on a Crew Dragon.

The report sharply criticized NASA’s handling of the incident, including what NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called “unprofessional conduct” during debates on how to proceed with the mission and “insufficient senior NASA leadership engagement.”

“This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again, and there will be leadership accountability,” he said at a Feb. 19 briefing about the report, but declined to say at the time if that meant NASA managers would be reassigned or fired.

NASA also announced Feb. 26 that Dana Hutcherson would take over as acting commercial crew program manager, effectively immediately. She succeeds Steve Stich, who had been commercial crew program manager for several years. Hutcherson had been deputy program manager for commercial crew.

Bowersox said the Starliner report offered a major lesson for future programs done on a more commercial basis that have less NASA oversight than traditional programs.

“I think the message is, in those fewer interactions, you have to make sure that you’re executing them perfectly,” he said, “that you have the right people, you have the right information, and that you are capable of making the right decisions with that lower impact of the government and lower level of interaction with the contractor team.”

He said NASA is developing a corrective action plan to “tighten up all of our processes” in the commercial crew program. He added he expected Boeing to be able to make an uncrewed test flight of Starliner this year.

Montalbano has been deputy associate administrator for space operations since April 2024. He was manager of the ISS program from 2020 to 2024 and earlier in his career was a flight director.