Boeing's starliner spaceship returns to Earth without Sunita Williams, Barry Wilmore
PTC News Desk: Boeing's Starliner returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) without astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry E Wilmore.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule landed smoothly at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 0401 GMT (9:30 a.m.), its descent delayed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags after leaving the ISS nearly six hours earlier.
The #Starliner spacecraft is back on Earth.
At 12:01am ET Sept. 7, @BoeingSpace’s uncrewed Starliner spacecraft landed in White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. pic.twitter.com/vTYvgPONVc — NASA Commercial Crew (@Commercial_Crew) September 7, 2024
Ground teams reported hearing sonic booms as it streaked red hot across the night sky, having experienced temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius) during atmospheric reentry.
After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for an approximately week-long test flight, a last shakedown before being certified to carry crew to and from the orbital laboratory.
However, unforeseen thruster challenges and helium leaks on the way up disrupted those plans, and NASA decided it was safer to return Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on a rival SpaceX Crew Dragon, though they will have to wait until February 2025.
A smooth, uneventful ride was viewed as crucial not only for preserving some pride but also for Boeing's future certification prospects.
The century-old aerospace giant conducted extensive ground testing to replicate the technical issues encountered during the spaceship's ascension and devised plans to avoid future failures.
With its reputation already tarnished by safety worries about its passenger jets, Boeing gave public and private assurances that it could be trusted to return the astronauts safely -- an assessment that NASA did not share.
"Boeing believed in the model that they had created that tried to predict the thruster degradation for the rest of the flight," Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, told reporters this week. But "the NASA team, due to the uncertainty in the modelling, could not get comfortable with that," he added, characterizing the mood during meetings as "tense."
- With inputs from agencies
