The Starliner has landed safely. And this is a first for its tortuous space adventure. The Boeing ship touched down this morning at 6:01 a.m. CET at the White Sands spaceport in New Mexico. It did so three months later than planned and without the two NASA astronauts who traveled on it to the International Space Station (ISS). The space agency’s officials decided not to put Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on board the Starliner for the return trip after several thrusters showed problems on the outbound trip. Williams and Wilmore will spend another five months on the space station before returning to Earth in February with a competing ship, Space X’s Dragon Crew.
The Starliner’s undocking and landing went off without a hitch, backing up Boeing officials’ claims that their vehicle was safe for astronauts. NASA was less sure about that, and so decided that the crew would remain on the ISS and the craft would return to Earth on its own. It has been leaked to the press that the meeting in which the decision was made ended in shouting matches. Steve Stich, director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, downplayed that idea in a press conference in which no Boeing spokesperson was present, as in previous appearances. But he ended up acknowledging that “there was some tension in the room.”
Descending with three parachutes, the Starliner landed at the White Sands spaceport in New Mexico. Huge airbags cushioned the impact. Recovery teams then began working to recover the Starliner and return it to NASA facilities in Kennedy Space Center. After several tests over the past few weeks, they want to continue analysing the craft to understand what went wrong during take-off. In any case, nothing seems to have gone wrong during landing. After a series of failures and delays, it could be said that last night’s manoeuvre was a success.
The operation began at 0:04 this Saturday, Spanish peninsular time. After undocking from the space station, the Starliner carried out tests by firing 12 thrusters. Only one of them did not work perfectly. Then, 10 of the thrusters of the service module were fired, and all responded as expected. Finally, the ship began a remote-controlled descent at the White Sands space base (New Mexico, USA).
After several orbits around the planet, Starliner’s large thrusters fired for nearly a minute to drop it out of orbit. It then detached itself from its service module, the component containing the problematic thrusters. NASA broadcast the entire process live, which appeared to go off without a hitch. “The flight is going smoothly,” the commentator said.
Despite the good news, the date on which Starliner spacecraft will be able to establish a regular line of manned space flights to the ISS, as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has done, which has been operating since 2020, remains up in the air. Boeing wanted to compete with Elon Musk’s company by developing its most ambitious space program to date. The initial plan was for these flights to become regular in 2018.but after multiple delays and the fiasco of the current test mission, it is ruled out that the Starliner will enter service before the summer of 2025. The first step to make that happen and for NASA to regain confidence in Boeing, was to land its ship successfully. It seems that this has been achieved, but it is still a small step for man, for Boeing and for its particular space race.
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