With no crew aboard, spacecraft Starliner lands without a hitch

The beleaguered Starliner spacecraft, built by Boeing, successfully landed in New Mexico just after midnight, 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.

Starliner launched on June 5th with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, and Boeing and NASA initially said their test flight would last about eight days.

Instead, the mission stretched out for weeks as Boeing and NASA workers tried to understand why some thrusters had failed as Starliner approached the station.

The decision to bring Starliner back without its crew means that the astronauts will have to live on the station until February.

“Since we knew this was a test flight, with intention we put them through long-duration space station training,” says Dana Weigel, NASA’s program manager for the station, who adds that the astronauts have been helping out with chores and science experiments. “We had them well prepared to move into this role.”

The astronauts will be going home on a previously scheduled flight by Boeing’s competitor, SpaceX. NASA had to rejigger its plans to make sure two seats would be free in that SpaceX capsule.

What’s more, in case the space station suffers an emergency that forces an evacuation before that capsule arrives, the station’s crew had to jerry-rig two extra seats in a different SpaceX spacecraft that’s currently docked there.

All of this has been a blow to aerospace giant Boeing. Starliner had two previous flights, without a crew on board, and both experienced problems — its first flight, in 2019, didn’t even make it to the station.

SpaceX, meanwhile, received less money from NASA to develop a commercial space taxi service, yet nonetheless managed to develop a vehicle that’s been taking astronauts to and from the station for years.

NASA started its commercial crew program to encourage industry to take over the job of ferrying astronauts and cargo to the station, so that it could focus on going back to the moon and beyond.

Now that Starliner is back on the ground, Boeing and NASA will further analyze the thrusters to see if modifying the spacecraft or how its flown could keep the thrusters from overheating in the future.

Mission managers put the thrusters through their paces after Starliner undocked from the station and before it piloted itself to a safe landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

“Many parts of the flight went extremely well, and Starliner is a great spacecraft,” says Stich. “What we really need to go do is look at the things that didn’t perform the way we expected.”