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The Starliner saga has lastly come to an finish — for now. Simply after midnight on Saturday, Boeing’s Starliner capsule returned from the Worldwide House Station, touching down at White Sands House Harbor, New Mexico.
The capsule returned autonomously to Earth with out its two crew members, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will stay aboard the station till subsequent February. The area company decided late final month that the pair will make their journey again to Earth on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule, after Starliner skilled technical points early within the mission.
At a post-flight press convention on Saturday, NASA’s business crew program supervisor Steve Stich referred to as the flight “darn near flawless.” He added that the profitable mission provoked blended emotions amongst employees.
“From a human perspective, 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,” he stated. “We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board.”
Just a bit piece of personal data on this story: By now, you’ve in all probability heard that the primary launch of Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket won’t be for NASA. That rocket had been scheduled to launch two spacecraft to Mars for NASA throughout an eight-day window that opens on October 13. However NASA introduced on Friday that it was pushing the mission, referred to as ESCAPADE, to spring 2025, citing potential value and technical points with de-fueling the 2 satellites.
What I’m listening to is that there was an ATP (authority-to-proceed) assembly to go/no-go fueling the spacecraft the day earlier than NASA formally postponed the mission. Whereas this resolution probably comes all the way down to the readiness of the launch automobile, fueling the spacecraft is a important juncture. It is smart that they selected to simply delay quite than incur the dangers — technical, monetary, and many others. — of getting to de-fuel them.
This week in area historical past
This week, we’re remembering the tragedy of the September 11 terrorist assaults in New York Metropolis. Do you know: There was solely a single American off-world when the assaults occurred? NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was on board the Worldwide House Station on the time, and as quickly as he discovered concerning the assaults, he instantly went to seize some pictures of the location from area.
“The smoke seemed to have an odd bloom to it at the base of the column that was streaming south of the city. After reading one of the news articles we just received, I believe we were looking at NY around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower. How horrible…” – Frank Culbertson
