Boeing’s first astronaut mission on Friday night ended with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.
Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.
It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks.
Photo: AFP / NASA
For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.
Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) instead.
Their SpaceX ride would launch until the end of this month, which means they would be stuck until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.
Photo: NASA via AP
Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it, but their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.
So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.
“She’s on her way home,” Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 420km over China and disappeared into the black void.
Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out.
“A good landing, pretty awesome,” Boeing Mission Control said.
Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheers.
There were some snags during re-entry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said.
Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich told a news conference early yesterday. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.”
Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing, but two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling.
“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.
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