Boeing’s Starliner capsule returns home without its crew

We’ve wrapped up our live coverage for the day. Read more about the Boeing Starliner mission here, or scroll through the posts below to relive the test flight’s return as it happened.

The SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft, crewed by astronauts from NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, prepares to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico in March 2023.

Boeing’s Starliner has had a rough test flight — and it had two uncrewed test flights before this that encountered their own bouts of troublesome errors.

Boeing and SpaceX each received contracts at the same time to develop their own spacecraft capable of ferrying crew to and from the ISS.

SpaceX got $2.6 billion while Boeing received $4.2 billion in 2014. And SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has now been flying routine astronaut trips for years, while Starliner is still working out concerning issues.

But NASA brought up the fact that it’s not so simple to compare the two directly.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft has its origin in the cargo Dragon program — a spacecraft designed to carry only supplies and experiments to the ISS starting back in 2008.

“Keep in mind that we took a different path with the Dragon vehicles,” said Dana Weigel, NASA’s International Space Station program manager. “So by and large, things like dealing with (propellant) systems and a lot of the things that we’re now learning with the crewed flight test (of Starliner) were dealt with (on Dragon) during the cargo era. …So very different development paths between the two spacecraft.”

NASA officials overseeing the Starliner program have plenty to celebrate. But there are still numerous hurdles to confront as the space agency and Boeing work to get the Starliner spacecraft to a place where it can begin flying routine missions with NASA astronauts on board.

“Clearly we got some work to do,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager.

“The teams will understand that work and move forward,” he added. “And if you just look at mission objectives — we think we’ve probably got 85 to 90% of the mission objectives.”

However, not having astronauts on board for the return left something of a knowledge gap, he said.

“Obviously, there’s some things that we lack in terms of Butch and Suni’s test pilot expertise and how the vehicle performed (on the way home),” Stich said. “What they saw in the cockpit — we won’t have that data, but we still have the wealth of data from the spacecraft itself.”

One key recurring question during this early morning press conference is “Where are the Boeing representatives?”

NASA’s Joel Montalbano weighed in.

“We did talk to Boeing before this. They deferred to NASA (to) represent the mission,” he said.

“I will tell you that Boeing has critical work that they do for NASA and the International Space Station Program, the Commercial Crew Program, and the Space Launch System program (which involves building a moon rocket for astronauts) — and their work is critical to our success, and we fully expect Boeing to continue all three of those programs,” Montalbano added.

Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, also commented on the relationship between the space agency and the company following the test flight.

“From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing,” he said. “But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it. We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board.”

From left: Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Operations Joel Montalbano, Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich and International Space Station Program Manager Dana Weigel attend a press conference in Houston, Texas on September 7, 2024, after Boeing Starliner's landing.

During NASA’s news briefing, Steve Stich — NASA’s commercial crew program manager — talked a lot about the next time Starliner will fly.

But since Starliner experienced issues in flight back in June, it wasn’t clear whether NASA would want Boeing to repeat some testing — and potentially order another test flight.

Stich said early Saturday that it’s not clear exactly what the path forward for Starliner looks like. That will “take a little time,” he said.

However, he added: “Now we’ve landed a capsule in the US on land. The entry in particular has been darn near flawless, so that — I wouldn’t say it surprised me — but as I step back and think about the mission: The entry itself was just, and the deorbit burn was spot on.”

Stich also acknowledged that if on-the-ground modeling were perfect, perhaps NASA would have trusted Starliner to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on Starliner’s return flight.

“If we’d had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say we could have had a crewed flight — but we didn’t have that,” he said.

There are no Boeing officials present at the 1:30 a.m. ET news conference hosted by NASA.

But the company did post a brief update on its Starliner updates website. The dispatch included a quote from Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program.

“I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing,” Nappi said. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”

Boeing, NASA, and U.S. Army personnel in White Sands, New Mexico, work around the Boeing Starliner spacecraft in December 2019 shortly after it returned from a test flight.

Instead of splashing down in the ocean, as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and other capsules dating back to NASA’s Mercury program have done, Starliner hit dry land.

There were five possible landing sites, mostly across the southwestern United States: two in New Mexico, one in Utah, another in Arizona and, finally, one in California.

For this landing, Boeing and NASA targeted New Mexico’s White Sands Space Harbor — an area within the White Sands Missile Range previously used to train NASA space shuttle pilots.

But why touch down on land rather than splash down in the ocean?

It has nothing to do with the issues Starliner has experienced. Boeing has always designed the vehicle to work this way.

Seawater is rough on spacecraft: The salt can corrode components — and there’s the sheer hassle of getting ships out to sea to rescue a crew.

Former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman speaks with CNN on September 6.

Former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, who is now a professor and SpaceX consultant who helped lead the company’s effort to develop its first crew capsule, told CNN Friday night that he believes NASA did the right thing by deciding to fly Boeing’s Starliner home without crew on board.

“I think they did make the right call in this circumstance,” Reisman said.

“I think all those engineers who made the call — if you asked them to wager on what would happen right now — they would have bet that we would have what we’re seeing here, which is a fairly successful entry so far,” he added.

Reisman was referring to a thruster outage that Boeing and NASA officials revealed as the vehicle began its final descent. A series of checks carried out by teams on the ground showed that one of the thrusters on board the Starliner capsule itself had petered out.

Previous thruster outages that troubled the Boeing and NASA teams revolved around hardware located on Starliner’s service module — a cylindrical attachment that sits at the Starliner capsule’s base.

The live show of Starliner’s return has concluded.

NASA and Boeing teams left the webcast on a good note, as the Starliner spacecraft landed safely at New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range.

Rescue and recovery teams were heading toward the landing site.

The next updates are expected around 1:30 a.m. ET as NASA officials address the public during a news conference.

Once again, a Boeing representative will not be present. No Starliner news conference has included a Boeing executive since NASA deemed Starliner unsafe for astronauts’ return on August 24.

To close out NASA’s livestream, Boeing’s Lauren Brennecke offered a final message:

“Starliner has returned safely. Well done to the entire team for completing the mission with a successful undocking, deorbit and landing — Starliner has once again proven herself a safe ride to and from space,” Brennecke said.