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Boeing’s Starliner space capsule landed in the New Mexico desert on Wednesday, completing a six-day mission that eventually landed on the International Space Station and could lead to astronaut flights.
The capsule, with no crew on board, landed as scheduled at 6:49 p.m. Eastern Time on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico under a trio of parachutes. Airbags cushioned the landing.
The landing was the last step in a crucial test for Boeing and NASA, which required the aerospace company to demonstrate that it could safely fly the vehicle to the station and return autonomously before allowing make him fly astronauts.
The return flight went smoothly, NASA and Boeing said, from decoupling with the space station, then firing their propellants to deorbit and enter the atmosphere. When it sank to Earth, its heat shield withstood temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Just a nice landing in White Sands tonight,” Boeing spokeswoman Lauren Seabrook told the live broadcast of the landing.
He added that the spacecraft landed about three-tenths of a mile southeast of the landing site, “which is basically a bull’s eye,” he said.
It is unclear, however, when the first manned flight would take place.
On the way to the station, two of its main thrusters were cut off after the sensors registered problems. The backups started without delay, putting the spacecraft on the right path to the station, but once it approached the station, two other smaller thrusters, used to position the spacecraft to docking, they also had problems, Boeing said. In addition, the spacecraft’s thermal control system, used to keep the spacecraft at the proper temperature, also failed.
Despite these challenges, NASA and Boeing hailed the mission as a first “historic” one that would give the space agency an alternative to SpaceX to bring cargo and astronauts to the station. Mark Nappi, vice president of Boeing, which oversees the Starliner program, said that despite the problems, “the spacecraft is in excellent condition” and that “it worked as it was supposed to.”
Steve Stich, who heads NASA’s commercial crew program, said last week that the problems were overcome without too much trouble, but that the “faults” should be studied.
“We have a lot of redundancy, so it didn’t really affect the encounter operations at all or affect the rest of the flight,” he said after the coupling. “I know that after the flight, we will go and study the faults there and see what happened.”
This investigation is made more difficult by the fact that engineers on the ground will not be able to examine the two main propellers that were cut, as they are housed in the spacecraft’s service module, which was launched during the return.
Still, NASA and Boeing celebrated the flight as a success. During a post-flight briefing on Wednesday evening, Stich said the “test flight was a great success. We met all mission objectives.” He added that “the systems worked very well in the vehicle and, you know, once we work with all the data, we will be ready to take the crew to the vehicle.”
Although there were several issues along the way, he said there were no “spectaculars.” Despite the problems with the propellers, he said, “I see no reason why we can’t continue to a manned flight test below.”
Nappi added that “we are very pleased with the outcome of this mission.”
Boeing and NASA have said they would like to be able to do a mission with astronauts by the end of the year, but they should first make sure they understand all the issues that have arisen and study the data they have. the capsule is now back on the ground.
The program is already lagging behind years after a number of previous problems. Boeing first attempted unmanned test flight in December 2019. But had to interrupt the test after a major software problem and a communications failure caused the spacecraft to burn too much fuel and not enter. in an orbit that transported it to the space station. It was 20 months before the company tested it again, but that flight failed to land last August when engineers discovered that 13 valves in the service module were locked in the closed position.