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The new Boeing Starliner capsule was due to return to Earth on Wednesday from its first unmanned spacecraft trip to the International Space Station (ISS), completing a high-risk test flight as NASA’s next vehicle to take humans to Earth. orbit.
Less than a week after launching from the U.S. Space Force base at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the CST-100 Starliner was scheduled to autonomously decouple from the space station at 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT) to embark on a five-hour journey. more flight back.
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If all goes well, the end of the mission will come with the rubber drop-shaped boat making a fiery atmospheric re-entry followed by a parachute with air cushions that will land on the desert floor near White Sands, New Mexico at 18:49 PDT (2249). GMT).
The Starliner was launched last Thursday on an Atlas V rocket supplied by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance and achieved its main goal, an appointment with the ISS, despite four of its multiple thrusters on board did not malfunction along the way.
Boeing engineers also had to improvise a solution for a thermal control defect during the capsule’s final approach to the space station, orbiting about 270 miles (430 kilometers) above Earth.
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But NASA and Boeing officials said none of the problems encountered so far should prevent Starliner from returning safely, and attributed the problem to the learning process of developing a new spacecraft.
A successful mission would move the Starliner, beset by repeated delays and costly engineering setbacks, a major step closer to providing NASA with a reliable second route to transport astronauts to and from the space station.
Since resuming manned flights into orbit from U.S. soil in 2020, nine years after the end of the space shuttle program, the U.S. space agency has had to rely solely on Falcon rockets. 9 and the Crew Dragon capsules from the private company SpaceX by billionaire Elon Musk.
Previously, the only other way to get to the lab in orbit was to take trips aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, a currently less attractive alternative in light of rising tensions between the US and Russia over the war in Ukraine. .
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Boeing is also well on its way as the Chicago-based company struggles to emerge from successive crises in its aircraft and space defense business unit. The Starliner program alone has cost the company nearly $ 600 million over the past two and a half years.
An unfortunate first Starliner orbital test flight in late 2019 nearly ended the loss of the vehicle after a software bug that effectively thwarted the spacecraft’s ability to reach the space station.
Subsequent problems with the Starliner propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, led Boeing to scour a second attempt to launch the capsule last summer.
Starliner remained on the ground for another nine months while the two companies argued over what caused the fuel valves to shut down and which company was responsible for fixing them.
The final test mission ending Wednesday could pave the way for Starliner to fly its first astronaut crew to the space station in the fall, NASA said.
The advanced orbiting site is currently home to a crew of three American astronauts from NASA, an Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts. (Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Bradley Perrett)
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