With no crew aboard, spacecraft Starliner lands without a hitch
SEPTEMBER 7, 202412:10 AM ET
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Nell Greenfieldboyce 2010
Nell Greenfieldboyce
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This image, taken from NASA video, shows the Boeing Starliner capsule coming down through the darkness over New Mexico.
This image, taken from NASA video, shows the Boeing Starliner capsule coming down through the darkness over New Mexico.
NASA
The beleaguered Starliner spacecraft, built by Boeing, successfully landed in New Mexico just after midnight Eastern time, ending a crucial test flight that proved to be a real headache for NASA.
Officials at the space agency feared that Starliner’s thrusters might malfunction during its return, just as some thrusters had on its journey to the International Space Station.
That’s why, when the gumdrop-shaped space capsule parachuted down to Earth, it carried only cargo — and its first crew remained safely on board the International Space Station.
Leaving them there “was a tough decision to make. It was really hard to determine whether to be uncrewed or not,” Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters earlier this week.
But there was enough uncertainty with regard to how the thrusters would perform that NASA officials preferred to err on the side of caution. The space agency, after all, remains haunted by two past disasters, the loss of space shuttles Columbia and Challenger and their crews.
After Starliner made a picture-perfect landing, Stich told reporters that the spacecraft did well during its return flight.
"It was a bullseye landing," he said. "It's really great to get the spacecraft back."
Asked by a reporter if he had any second thoughts about NASA's decision not to fly astronauts home on Starliner, Stich said "it's always hard to have that retrospective look" but "I think we made the right decision."
He said while he and others on the team felt happy about the successful landing, "there's a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would've been the way we had planned it" with astronauts on board when it landed.
"I think there's, depending on who you are on the team, different emotions associated with that," he continued. "I think it's going to take a little time to work through that, for me a little bit, and then for everybody else on the Boeing and NASA team."
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/07/nx-s1-5103722/starliner-nasa-boeing-crew-space-station-lands