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May 25, 2022 • 14 minutes ago • 2 minutes of reading • Join the conversation
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The new Boeing Starliner capsule was due to land back on Earth on Wednesday from its first unmanned voyage to the International Space Station (ISS), completing a high-stakes test flight as NASA’s next vehicle to transport humans into orbit.
Less than a week after its launch from the U.S. Space Cape Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the CST-100 Starliner had to disengage autonomously from the space station at 14:36 EDT (1836 GMT) to embark on a five-hour plus a return flight.
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If all goes as planned, the finale of the mission will come with a gum-shaped ship that will return to a fiery atmosphere, followed by an air-cushioned parachute landing on the desert floor near White Sands, New Mexico at 6 p.m. 49 PDT (2249). TIME ZONE).
Starliner was launched into orbit last Thursday on an Atlas V rocket provided by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance and achieved its main goal, a meeting with the ISS, although four of its many onboard propulsion devices did not work on the road.
Boeing engineers also had to improvise a workaround for a thermal control defect during the capsule’s final approach to a space station about 270 miles (430 kilometers) above Earth.
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But NASA and Boeing officials said none of the problems encountered so far should prevent Starliner from returning safely, and they attributed such things to the training process to develop a new spacecraft.
A successful mission would move Starliner, obsessed with repeated delays and costly engineering failures, a big step closer to providing NASA with a second reliable route to transport astronauts to and from the space station.
After resuming manned flights to orbit from the United States in 2020, nine years after the end of the space shuttle program, the U.S. space agency had to rely solely on Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules from the private company of billionaire Elon Musk SpaceX.
Previously, the only other way to reach the orbital laboratory was by boarding the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an alternative that is now less attractive in light of heightened US-Russian tensions over the war in Ukraine.
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Boeing is also under threat as the Chicago-based company tries to emerge from successive crises in its jet business and space defense business. The Starliner program alone has cost the company nearly $ 600 million over the past 2 1/2 years.
An ill-fated Starliner’s first orbital test flight in late 2019 almost ended in vehicle loss after a software problem that effectively thwarted the spacecraft’s ability to reach the space station.
Subsequent problems with the Starliner propulsion system supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne prompted Boeing to delete a second attempt to launch the capsule last summer.
Starliner remained in custody for another nine months while the two companies debated what caused the fuel valves to close and which company was responsible for repairing them.
The test mission, which ended on Wednesday, could pave the way for Starliner to fly its first astronaut crew to the space station in the fall, NASA said.
The orbital outpost is currently home to a crew of three NASA astronauts from the United States, an Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency and three Russian astronauts. (Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; edited by Bradley Peret)
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