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Boeing Starliner departs space station without astronauts, marking another tumultuous milestone

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 (Reuters) - Boeing's Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station on Friday, leaving behind its first crew of U.S. astronauts to return to Earth empty and finish a drawn-out test mission fraught with technical issues.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first two to fly Starliner in June, remained on the ISS with seven other astronauts 250 miles (400 km) in orbit as Starliner autonomously departed the laboratory at 6:04 p.m. ET (2204 GMT) for a six-hour journey toward Earth.


The two astronauts bid farewell to a capsule whose propulsion system problems stretched their eight-day test into an eight-month mission. Stocked with extra food and supplies, Wilmore and Williams will instead return on a SpaceX vehicle in February 2025, NASA announced last week.

Since then, Boeing engineers have uploaded new software to Starliner that allows it to come back without a crew inside. The return trip will be a key test of Starliner's maneuvering capability.
The capsule is poised to use its maneuvering thrusters to gradually lower its orbit and reenter Earth's atmosphere at around 11:17 p.m. (0317 GMT on Saturday), followed by a 12:03 a.m. parachute-assisted touchdown at the White Sands Space Harbor, an arid military test site in New Mexico.
Five of Starliner's 28 maneuvering thrusters had failed with Wilmore and Williams on board during their approach to the ISS in June, while the same propulsion system sprang several leaks of helium, which is used to pressurize the thrusters.
Despite successfully docking on June 6, the failures set off a monthslong investigation by Boeing - with some help from NASA - that has cost the company $125 million, bringing total cost overruns on the Starliner program just above $1.6 billion since 2016, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings.
Boeing's Starliner woes have persisted since the spacecraft failed a 2019 test trip to the ISS without a crew. Starliner did a re-do mission in 2022 and largely succeeded, though some of its thrusters malfunctioned.
The aerospace giant's Starliner woes represent the latest struggle that calls into question Boeing's future in space, a domain it had dominated for decades until Elon Musk's SpaceX began offering cheaper launches for satellites and astronauts and reshaped the way NASA works with private companies.
Boeing hopes to recover the Starliner capsule after it touches down in New Mexico and continue its investigation into why the thrusters failed in space.
But the section housing Starliner's thrusters - the "service module" trunk that provides in-space maneuvering capabilities - is designed to detach from the capsule just before it plunges into Earth's atmosphere.
The service module bearing the faulty thrusters will burn up in the atmosphere, meaning Boeing will rely on simulated tests to figure out what went wrong with the hardware in space.
Starliner, bearing a heat shield to survive its own reentry, will deploy a series of parachutes to slow its descent and inflate a set of exterior airbags moments before touchdown to cushion the impact.

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended 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 departing 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. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.

Wilmore and 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 its empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

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

Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. “A good landing, pretty awesome,” said Boeing’s Mission Control.

Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak came in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

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

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich said at a news conference early 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 defense 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. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion.

SpaceX’s crew ferry flight later this month will be its 10th for NASA since 2020. The Dragon capsule will launch on the half-year expedition with only two astronauts since two seats are reserved for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They’ve 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 could not get 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 won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Starliner will be transported in a couple weeks back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the analyses will unfold.

NASA officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing U.S. 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 reentry. That doesn’t give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to NASA.

Stich said post-landing it’s 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.

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