Boeing’s troubled space capsule lands on Earth without astronauts

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended on Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because Nasa judged their return too risky.

Six hours after leaving the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.

It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks.

For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.

Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but Nasa disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead.

Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and Nasa ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

“She’s on her way home,” Ms Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420km) over China and disappeared into the black void.

“A good landing, pretty awesome,” said Boeing’s Mission Control.

There were some snags during re-entry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager Steve Stich.

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Mr Stich said at a news conference early on Saturday.

“All of us feel happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.”

Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defence officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed Nasa’s ruling.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support Nasa’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.

Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, Nasa hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. This uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped a billion dollars.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They have kept busy in space, helping with repairs and experiments. The two are now full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board.

Even before the pair launched on June 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Starliner’s propulsion system was leaking helium. The leak was small and thought to be isolated, but four more cropped up after liftoff.

Then five thrusters failed. Although four of the thrusters were recovered, it gave Nasa pause as to whether more malfunctions might hamper the capsule’s descent from orbit.

Boeing conducted numerous thruster tests in space and on the ground over the summer, and was convinced its spacecraft could safely bring the astronauts back. But Nasa was not comfortable with the thruster situation and went with SpaceX.

Flight controllers conducted more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking; one failed to ignite. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They will not be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Nasa officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing US companies transporting astronauts. The goal is for SpaceX and Boeing to take turns launching crews — one a year per company — until the space station is abandoned in 2030 right before its fiery re-entry. That does not give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to Nasa.

Mr Stich said post-landing it is too early to know when the next Starliner flight with astronauts might occur.

“It will take a little time to determine the path forward,” he said.