Boeing’s troubled Starliner departed the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday for Earth without any astronauts on board even after NASA deemed the risk too serious.
After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for what was to be a roughly week-long test mission — a final test before it is ultimately certified to ferry crews to and from the orbital lab.
But those plans were derailed by an unexpected thruster malfunction and a helium leak, and NASA eventually decided it would be safer to bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams back on the rival SpaceX Crew Dragon — though they would have to wait until February 2025.
The Starliner automatically separated from the space station at 6:04 p.m. Eastern time (2204 GMT), and is set to land at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at around 0403 GMT.
“It’s time to bring Calypso home,” Williams radioed mission control, using the spacecraft’s nickname.
A smooth, uneventful journey is crucial not just to salvaging prestige, but also to Boeing’s chances of achieving certification in the future.
The century-old aerospace giant had carried out extensive ground testing aimed at replicating the technical problems the spacecraft encountered during its ascent, and devised plans to prevent more problems.
Boeing, which had already suffered damage to its reputation over safety concerns about passenger planes, offered assurances publicly and privately that it could be trusted to bring the astronauts back — an assessment that NASA did not share.
“Boeing was confident in the model they built that attempted to predict thruster degradation over the remainder of the flight,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters this week.
But “the NASA team was not comfortable with that because of the uncertainty in the modeling,” he said, describing the atmosphere during the meetings as “tense.”
– Certification decisions are forthcoming –
Shortly after undocking, Starliner performed a powerful “breakout burn” to move it away from the station to prevent a collision — an action that wouldn’t have been necessary if it had a crew aboard, who could have taken manual control of the ship if necessary.
Overall, the expectation is that Starliner will land successfully in the desert with the aid of parachutes and airbags — just as it did during two previous unmanned tests in 2019 and 2022.
But ground teams will closely study all aspects of its performance, especially its troublesome thrusters, before the crucial “deorbit burn” that will bring the spacecraft back through Earth’s atmosphere, scheduled to take place at 0217 GMT.
NASA awarded billions of dollars in contracts to Boeing and SpaceX a decade ago to develop spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station after the end of the space shuttle program, which left the US space agency reliant on Russian rockets.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, initially considered the underdog, has outpaced mighty Boeing, and has successfully flown dozens of astronauts since 2020.
Meanwhile, the Starliner program has been plagued by setbacks.
In 2019, during the first uncrewed test flight, the capsule failed to rendezvous with the ISS due to a software flaw. A second software bug could have caused a catastrophic collision between its modules, but was caught and fixed in time.
Then in 2021, when the rocket was on the launchpad for a new flight, it had to be postponed once again due to blocked valves.
The ship finally arrived at the ISS on an uncrewed launch in May 2022. But crew testing was further delayed due to other problems such as weak parachutes and flammable tape in the cabin.
For the current mission, Wilmore and Williams were strapped into their seats and ready to take off twice, but a technical glitch caused them to be sent back to their quarters because of a delayed “scrub.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
