What now for these pod people?
Boeing’s Calamity Capsule has returned to Earth, bringing to an end a test mission that did not go entirely according to plan. Not least because the Starliner’s crew had to stay behind aboard the International Space Station.
That Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner’s return to Earth was relatively uneventful and, according to NASA’s commercial crew manager Steve Stich, ended with a “bullseye landing” in New Mexico, will be scant comfort to the engineers dealing with the fact that this commercial crew-carrying spacecraft was deemed unfit to carry a crew.
That’s not to say the Starliner’s re-entry was without incident. During a post-landing news conference, Stich noted that one of the 12 thrusters on the Boeing podule didn’t perform as expected, and a redundant thruster was able to take over. The navigation system also temporarily had difficulty acquiring a GPS signal as the spacecraft came out of the plasma generated by reentry.
The Starliner returned to Earth without a crew after engineers felt the risk to its astronauts was too high. Helium leaks and, in particular, odd behavior from the spacecraft’s thrusters left the ground team rattled. After an extended stay attached to the orbiting space station while testing was carried out, the decision was taken that Starliner’s crew – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – would be returned to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule early next year.
