Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landed in a New Mexico desert late on Friday, months after its original departure date and without the two astronauts it carried when it launched in early June.

Starliner returned to Earth seemingly without a hitch, a Nasa live stream showed, nailing the critical final phase of its mission.

The spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 11pm ET at orbital speeds of roughly 27,400km/h (17,025mph). About 45 minutes later, it deployed a series of parachutes to slow its descent and inflated a set of airbags moments before touching down at the White Sands Space Harbor, an arid desert in New Mexico.

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    Still was the right decision not to chance it.
    But I bet the astronauts wish they’d been on it now.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      Someone who’s worked their entire life to not only become trained as an astronaut, but actually go on a space mission. What do you think they prefer? Going home today or staying another few months on an actual space station?

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        2 months ago

        I think they’d prefer going home. The mission they came up for is long done, they may have important events in their life or their family’s lives scheduled for after the planned return, and staying up for months increases the chances of long term damage to their bodies.

        I imagine they’re pretty bored by now.

        • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there

          • Adderbox76
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            2 months ago

            I think I read somewhere, but I’d have to go track it down, that the ISS was catching up on a whole lot of back-logged experiments with their unexpected addition to the team.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I keep saying the same thing and get a bunch of people replying things like, “how do you know they want to see their kids?”

          • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            To be fair, I’ve met some absent parents that genuinely don’t care if they see their kids again, and unfortnately it is possible for someone like that to be capable of being an astronaut.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Sure, but I think that’s a different argument from “they won’t take seeing their kids again over months in space when it was supposed to be an eight-day mission because they’re in space.”

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          You would think that, but that’s probably not the case. This is what they train for, this is what they want to do. As a rule, astronauts don’t tend to get bored of space, that’s why they’re astronauts.

      • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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        2 months ago

        0 gravity and living in an enclosed space take a huge toll on one physical and mental being, obviously they wanna go home today, but i bet they also wanna go home in one piece

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That makes me wonder. What happens if an astronaut just…refuses to come back? They’re up on the station and their mission is at its end. They broadcast to NASA. “Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.” How would NASA handle that situation?

        • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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          2 months ago

          I seem to recall reading somewhere they have sedatives and stuff because people have a real potential to freak out and try to walk out of air locks.

          I’ll see if I can find the article.

          Edit: I didn’t reread it… but I had this one book marked

          • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Wow. Good find. It looks like they were concerned about a potentially suicidal person opening the hatch. So much so that they actually installed a padlock on it in future flights.

            • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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              2 months ago

              That’s right, I remember that now. A failed experiment or something made the astronaut suicidal…not the one I was thinking of, let me see if I can find the other one lol

        • nocturne@sopuli.xyz
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          2 months ago

          “Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.”

          Ed Baldwin, is that you?

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      and that could have potentially been what caused to crash and burn or burn and crash. choices choices.

      anyhow… I’m thinking they want to be home right now, but maybe not riding on a boeing.

  • lemmeout@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    I like the part where they waited until after markets closing to take a chance. Also note how NASA announced that astronauts were staying after markets closed.

  • Adderbox76
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    2 months ago

    People are (rightfully) raking Starliner and Boeing for the shitshow that has been this project so far. But the positive to take from this flight, even landing without the crew, is the fact that the capsule itself performed fine. It was the service module that was being screwy. The actual “capsule” part in “capsule” seems to have had it’s issues ironed out. Just fix the shitty service module.

  • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Alex baumgardner jumped from the balloon from basically space, why haven’t they figured out a way to do it from low orbit yet?

  • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Fucking piece of shit Boeing. Cant believe they would land a god damn spacecraft safely back on Earth. We need to gut them and give all our money to Elon. /s

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          You do know that “let’s get private corporations out of spaceflight entirely” might be something some people would like, yes?

          • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Private companies have always been a big part of space flight, except it used to be only large defense contractors (Aka, Boeing, Raytheon, lockheed, etc). Honestly the situation is better now than it has ever been. But we’ll never get all private companies out of space flight, NASA can’t do it all themselves.

              • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                And they’re doing a real bang up job of it… Dropping tanks of Nitrogen Tetroxide and hydrazine to explode near towns. Really killing it.

                And you should know, China is not doing it themselves, there are about a dozen launch companies and aerospace manufacturers making rockets in China.

                The Long March 2C that carelessly drops its booster all over the place (a poorly designed rocket) is government made, but they aren’t all that way.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  I didn’t realize all of those countries were China. We can also add in Japan. Which I guess is also China?

              • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                Well, we have multiple launch vehicles, we have multiple crew capsules, multiple cargo vehicles, and just about all of them are cheaper than our previous options. The crew capsules we’re using now are all several orders of magnitude safer than the space shuttle (even the Starliner in it’s current state is an order of magnitude safer than the shuttle). And now we have options that don’t require us to negotiate with Russia to use them.