Boeing’s troubled Starliner returns empty, astronauts Sunita, Butch stuck in space

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended on Friday night with an empty capsule landing and the two test pilots, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, still in space — left behind until next year since 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, the return of Wilmore and Williams 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 will not launch until the end of this month, which means they will 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 their 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 km) 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 coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

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

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Sunita on board,” Stich said on 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.”