With no crew aboard, spacecraft Starliner lands without a hitch

The beleaguered Starliner spacecraft, built by Boeing, successfully landed in New Mexico just after midnight Eastern time, ending a crucial test flight that proved to be a real headache for NASA.

Officials at the space agency feared that Starliner’s thrusters might malfunction during its return, just as some thrusters had on its journey to the International Space Station.

That’s why, when the gumdrop-shaped space capsule parachuted down to Earth, it carried only cargo — and its first crew remained safely on board the International Space Station.

Leaving them there “was a tough decision to make. It was really hard to determine whether to be uncrewed or not,” Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters earlier this week.

But there was enough uncertainty with regard to how the thrusters would perform that NASA officials preferred to err on the side of caution. The space agency, after all, remains haunted by two past disasters, the loss of space shuttles Columbia and Challenger and their crews.

After Starliner made a picture-perfect landing, Stich told reporters that the spacecraft did well during its return flight.

"It was a bullseye landing," he said. "It's really great to get the spacecraft back."

Asked by a reporter if he had any second thoughts about NASA's decision not to fly astronauts home on Starliner, Stich said "it's always hard to have that retrospective look" but "I think we made the right decision."

He said while he and others on the team felt happy about the successful landing, "there's a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would've been the way we had planned it" with astronauts on board when it landed.

"I think there's, depending on who you are on the team, different emotions associated with that," he continued. "I think it's going to take a little time to work through that, for me a little bit, and then for everybody else on the Boeing and NASA team."

Starliner launched on June 5 with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, and Boeing and NASA initially said their test flight would last about eight days.

Instead, the mission stretched out for weeks as Boeing and NASA workers tried to understand why some thrusters had failed as Starliner approached the station.

The decision to bring Starliner back without its crew means that the astronauts will have to live on the station until February.

“Since we knew this was a test flight, with intention we put them through long-duration space station training,” says Dana Weigel, NASA’s program manager for the station, who adds that the astronauts have been helping out with chores and science experiments. “We had them well prepared to move into this role.”

The astronauts will be going home on a previously scheduled flight by Boeing’s competitor, SpaceX. NASA had to rejigger its plans to make sure two seats would be free in that SpaceX capsule.

What’s more, in case the space station suffers an emergency that forces an evacuation before that capsule arrives, the station’s crew had to jerry-rig two extra seats in a different SpaceX spacecraft that’s currently docked there.

All of this has been a blow to aerospace giant Boeing. Starliner had two previous flights, without a crew on board, and both experienced problems — its first flight, in 2019, didn’t even make it to the station.

SpaceX, meanwhile, received less money from NASA to develop a commercial space taxi service, yet nonetheless managed to develop a vehicle that’s been taking astronauts to and from the station for years.

NASA started its commercial crew program to encourage industry to take over the job of ferrying astronauts and cargo to the station, so that it could focus on going back to the moon and beyond.

Now that Starliner is back on the ground, Boeing and NASA will further analyze the thrusters to see if modifying the spacecraft or how it's flown could keep the thrusters from overheating in the future.

Mission managers put the thrusters through their paces after Starliner undocked from the station and before it piloted itself to a safe landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

“Many parts of the flight went extremely well, and Starliner is a great spacecraft,” Stich said. “What we really need to go do is look at the things that didn’t perform the way we expected.”