Boeing’s troubled spacecraft has finally come home, but the two NASA astronauts who traveled in it to the International Space Station in June remain in orbit.
The Starliner has landed.
Boeing’s troubled spacecraft has finally come home, but the two NASA astronauts who traveled in it to the International Space Station in June remain in orbit.
Out of an abundance of caution, NASA officials decided not to put the astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, on Starliner for the return trip. They will spend an additional five months on the space station as part of the crew before coming back to Earth around February.
The undocking, reentry and landing of Starliner proceeded smoothly, supporting the contention of Boeing officials that the vehicle was safe for the astronauts. None of the worries about Starliner’s thrusters turned out to affect the return.
Descending under three parachutes, the capsule touched down at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time Saturday. Airbags at the bottom of the capsule cushioned the impact.
The big maneuver of the evening was a success.
After several orbits of the planet, at 11:17 p.m., the large thrusters on Starliner fired for almost a minute to drop Starliner out of orbit. It then discarded its service module — the cylindrical component below the crew capsule that contained the troublesome thrusters.
“The flight home is going smooth,” a commentator said on NASA’s video coverage of the landing.
The crew capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the central Pacific, traveling to the northeast, crossing northwest Mexico en route to touching down in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Earlier in the evening, after leaving the space station, Starliner conducted test firings of 12 thrusters on the crew capsule section of the spacecraft. One did not work, but that does not pose a problem, because there are two redundant systems of six thrusters each.
