Boeing and NASA teams take part in a general rehearsal of the mission to prepare for the landing of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft at White Sands, New Mexico
WASHINGTON – Boeing’s Starliner capsule returned to Earth on Wednesday in the final step of a key test flight to prove that it is worthy of providing trips to NASA astronauts on the International Space Station.
The spacecraft was decommissioned autonomously at 14.36 Eastern Time (18.36 GMT) and was scheduled to land in New Mexico just over four hours later, at 22.49 GMT, ending a crucial six-day mission to restore Boeing’s reputation after past failures.
“The separation of #Starliner has been confirmed,” Boeing Space tweeted.
Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) is the last hurdle Starliner must remove before transporting humans on another test flight that could take place later this year.
Starliner docked at the ISS on Friday, a day after leaving the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Over the weekend, astronauts living aboard the research platform opened the hatch and “healed” the capsule’s passengers: Rosie the Rocketeer, a sensor-equipped mannequin and a stuffed toy called Jebediah. Kerman, a video game character and the ship’s zero g indicator. .
The mission has not been without its problems.
Two thrusters responsible for placing Starliner in a stable orbit failed, although officials insisted there was a lot of redundancy built into the system to overcome the problem.
On the day of the docking, the ship lost its scheduled contact time by more than an hour, after a ring responsible for sticking to the station did not unfold properly. Engineers had to retract the ring and remove it again before it ran a second time.
– Second taxi service –
Still, the bugs are smaller compared to the problems Starliner saw during its first test release, in 2019, when a software bug caused it to burn too much fuel to reach its destination, and another almost went signify that the vehicle was destroyed during re-entry.
The second error was detected in time to load a patch, and the ship was able to land a soft landing, slowed by its huge parachutes, at White Sands Space Harbor, the same spaceport where the Columbia space shuttle landed and where Starliner. is expected once again for the touchdown.
The spacecraft will return more than 600 pounds (270 kilograms) of cargo, including reusable tanks that provide breathable air to the station’s crew members, which will be renovated and recovered in a future flight.
Boeing and NASA also attempted to launch Starliner in August 2021, but the capsule was removed from the launch pad to address the non-open valve sticks as they should be, and the ship was eventually sent from new to the factory to fix it.
NASA wants to certify Starliner as the second “taxi” service for its astronauts on the space station, a role that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has provided since it was successful in a test mission for its Dragon capsule on 2020.
Both companies received fixed-price contracts ($ 4.2 billion from Boeing and $ 2.6 billion from SpaceX) in 2014, shortly after the end of the space shuttle program, during a time when the United States remained dependent on rockets. Russian soybeans for travel. in the advanced orbital site.