Troubled Starliner spacecraft is back on Earth, crew remains in space – Space – Science & Technology

The troubled Starliner spaceship of the American company Boeing successfully landed on Earth on Saturday. The agencies informed about it. The craft returned without a crew – the two astronauts it took to orbit in June this year on an initially eight-day mission will remain on the International Space Station (ISS) until February of next year, when they will return in the ship of the rival company SpaceX.

CTK

07.09.2024 07:45, updated: 09:12

In this image from a video provided by NASA, the empty Boeing Starliner capsule descends toward the White Sands launch pad in New Mexico on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024, after detaching from the International Space Station.

“There were some issues with the re-entry, including more problems with the thrusters, but the Starliner landed on the unit,” said Steve Stich, head of NASA’s commercial manned flight program.

Six hours after departure from the ISS, the Starliner landed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the ship descended through the desert darkness with the help of an autopilot. Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA aircraft captured the module as it approached the ground. “Good landing, pretty amazing,” astronaut Sunita Williams, who watched the Starliner’s landing from the space station about 420 kilometers above China, told mission control.

“We are all happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a part of each of us that wishes it would have turned out the way we planned,” program manager Stich said at today’s post-landing press conference, adding that he still believes the decision not to keep the astronauts on board was the right one.

Starliner launched on its first crewed mission this year on June 5 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The long-awaited test flight was accompanied by defects and several years of delays. Starliner’s first uncrewed test mission in 2019 went so badly — the ship failed to reach the space station due to software errors — that it had to be repeated three years later. Subsequent problems resulted in even more project delays and more than a billion dollars in repairs.

However, problems did not leave the Starliner. The original plan for the current mission called for two seasoned NASA veterans Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to spend eight days on the ISS. But the failure of the ship’s guidance nozzles on arrival at the station sparked a months-long debate between NASA and Boeing regarding the safe return of the crew. Ultimately, it was decided that returning Starliner astronauts would be too risky.

Starliner is the result of a program in which NASA ordered spacecraft from SpaceX and Boeing ten years ago. The first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took place in 2020, a ship of the same type will launch to the ISS at the end of this month to return the two castaways back to Earth next February.