Boeing’s Starliner capsule separated from the ISS at 6:04 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 6 and landed safely and carefully at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 12:01 a.m. on Sept. 7. The capsule is named Calypso, but it carried no crew despite flying to the ISS with astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
NASA decided in late August that the astronauts would return home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in February for safety reasons. Wilmore and Williams only provided support for the capsule’s homeward journey and watched coverage of its reentry and landing. Williams told ground control, “You can handle it. We’re with you and you can handle it. Get it back to Earth.”
The astronauts flew on the Starliner as part of its first crewed flight, which was intended to prove that the spacecraft is ready to regularly carry humans to the ISS alongside the SpaceX Crew Dragon.
They were only supposed to stay on the orbiting lab for eight days, but the spacecraft’s service module began leaking helium while they were there. Some of the module’s thrusters also malfunctioned. Starliner uses helium to pressurize its fuel tanks and push propellant in the thrusters that drive the spacecraft.
Over the past three months, engineers on the ground conducted tests on Starliner with the help of astronauts, but NASA ultimately decided to send Starliner back home without a crew because it did not trust the certainty of the thrusters’ performance.
During the Starliner’s post-landing press conference, Boeing was conspicuously absent, and three NASA officials spoke about the landing. When asked why Boeing was not there and whether the relationship between the agency and the company was affected by Starliner’s issues, the representatives said Boeing deferred to NASA to represent the mission.
He said all three of them spoke to Boeing managers and the company is committed to working with the agency. Steve Stich, manager of the Commercial Crew Program at NASA Kennedy, also said that although they were all happy with the landing, a part of them still wanted it to go exactly as they had planned, with the astronauts returning home aboard Calypso.
Stich, Joel Montalbano (NASA’s deputy associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate) and Dana Weigel (NASA’s manager for the International Space Station) all praised the Starliner for its successful docking and “bullseye landing.”
They said they learned a lot from the mission, which apparently achieved 85 to 90 percent of its objectives, and stressed that it’s important to remember that things don’t always go according to plan when it comes to test flights.
It will take about two weeks to get Calypso back to NASA grounds and then about a week to get all the data from the capsule. NASA and Boeing plan to analyze data collected by the spacecraft on its systems from the time it was in orbit to its undocking, reentry and landing. They will then use that information to design improvements for the spacecraft.
Unfortunately, they won’t be able to inspect the thrusters that malfunctioned on the flight to the ISS, as well as the “doghouse” that contained the spacecraft’s propellant system where the helium leaked. They had always planned to discard the service module that contained those elements upon reentry, and it’s now on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
NASA previously said the problems arose because the propulsion device got hotter than expected during the flight, causing the container’s seal to loosen and helium to leak. In the case of the thrusters, the heat apparently bulged the seal and restricted propellant flow, leading to the outage.
Stich said he wouldn’t call those problems insurmountable — he just needs some time to solve them. They also cannot say at this time whether Starliner’s next flight will have a crew. For now, the agency is preparing for other missions.
By the end of September, the SpaceX Crew-8 mission is scheduled to undock the vehicle and return to Earth, while the SpaceX Crew-9 mission is expected to launch. Crew-9 will fly with two astronauts instead of four to make room for Wilmore and Williams for their return flight in February.