An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.

During a telephone news conference on Friday, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said that the mission “had a lot of anomalies,” but that it was important that the agency continue to work with Boeing to fix them.

The agency is conducting an ongoing review with the company to assess what went wrong. But Douglas Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that the review had already found multiple failures in Boeing’s processes that should have caught the mistakes on the ground.