TechCrunch Space: Boeing’s Starliner returns to Earth

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The Starliner saga has finally come to an end — for now. Just after midnight on Saturday, Boeing’s Starliner capsule returned from the International Space Station, touching down at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

The capsule returned autonomously to Earth without its two crew members, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will remain aboard the station until next February. The space agency determined late last month that the pair will make their journey back to Earth on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule, after Starliner experienced technical issues early in the mission. 

At a post-flight press conference on Saturday, NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich called the flight “darn near flawless.” He added that the successful mission provoked mixed feelings among staff. 

“From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it,” he said. “We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board.”

Just a little piece of non-public info in this story: By now, you’ve probably heard that the first launch of Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket will not be for NASA. That rocket had been scheduled to launch two spacecraft to Mars for NASA during an eight-day window that opens on October 13. But NASA announced on Friday that it was pushing the mission, called ESCAPADE, to spring 2025, citing potential cost and technical issues with de-fueling the two satellites. 

What I’m hearing is that there was an ATP (authority-to-proceed) meeting to go/no-go fueling the spacecraft the day before NASA formally postponed the mission. While this decision doubtless comes down to the readiness of the launch vehicle, fueling the spacecraft is a critical juncture. It makes sense that they chose to just delay rather than incur the risks — technical, financial, etc. — of having to de-fuel them.

This week in space history

This week, we’re remembering the tragedy of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. Did you know: There was only a single American off-world when the attacks happened? NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was on board the International Space Station at the time, and as soon as he learned about the attacks, he immediately went to capture some images of the site from space.

“The smoke seemed to have an odd bloom to it at the base of the column that was streaming south of the city. After reading one of the news articles we just received, I believe we were looking at NY around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower. How horrible…” – Frank Culbertson