News Mania Desk/Piyal Chatterjee / 7th September 2024
Just after midnight Eastern time, Boeing’s Starliner spaceship made a successful return to Earth, capping a difficult test trip for both NASA and Boeing that ended in New Mexico.
NASA officials found the trip to be tense since they had concerns regarding the spacecraft’s thrusters. There were worries that some of the components would malfunction again on the way back to the International Space Station (ISS) because they had malfunctioned during the approach.
NASA and Boeing will conduct a thorough analysis of the thrusters’ performance after it has safely returned to Earth.
On June 5, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams launched Starliner. NASA and Boeing had originally estimated that the test flight would last roughly eight days, but as the engineers struggled to find and fix the thruster problems that surfaced as the spacecraft got closer to the International Space Station, the mission was prolonged.
Wilmore and Williams will now likely stay on the ISS until February as a result of the decision to return Starliner without its crew.
Dana Weigel, NASA’s program manager for the ISS, assured that the astronauts were well-prepared for an extended stay, explaining, “Since we knew this was a test flight, with intention we put them through long-duration space station training.”
To guarantee that the SpaceX capsule will have two seats available for the Starliner crew, authorities had to reorganize its arrangements. Additionally, the crew has had to improvise and add two extra seats to another SpaceX spaceship that is now docked at the International Space Station in case of an emergency necessitating evacuation before the capsule arrives.
