NASA and Boeing are attempting to bring an empty Starliner spacecraft back to Earth tonight, weeks after the spacecraft was deemed too risky for astronauts to ride home.
The empty Starliner has detached from the International Space Station for the six-hour journey that is to conclude at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico just after midnight ET.
NASA is live streaming the undocking phase beginning and also the Starliner’s landing starting at 10:50 p.m. ET.
Live Science reported:
“The landing will conclude NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test — the first attempt to carry astronauts into space on the Starliner capsule. However, the test flight will end without the crew that initially rode the vehicle into orbit.”
Starliner was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on June 5, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams.
It experienced several unexpected issues during the flight, such as multiple helium leaks and thruster malfunctions, but it safely docked with the ISS on June 6.
“Wilmore and Williams were initially expected to stay aboard the ISS for as few as eight days before riding Starliner back home, but attempts to resolve the spacecraft’s issues dragged on for months. Finally, on Aug. 24, NASA announced in a news conference that it would bring Starliner home without its crew, leaving Williams and Wilmore to instead fly home on a SpaceX capsule no earlier than February 2025. The astronauts’ planned eight-day trip to space will now last at least 240 days.
‘There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters’, Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at the Aug. 24 news conference. ‘If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do … I think we would have taken a different course of action’.”
NASA is proceeding with undocking and deorbiting the spacecraft as planned, even if questions remain about the functionality of Starliner’s thrusters.
Starliner will perform a series of engine burns to position it appropriately, then it will attempt to reenter Earth’s atmosphere.
Starliner will perform a final 60-second deorbit burn, to slow the spacecraft enough for it to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and guide it toward the landing target.
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