Alysha John
The Boeing Starliner is a partially reusable spacecraft designed to transport crew to the International Space Station and other low-Earth-orbit destinations. On Aug. 31, NASA announced that it will be returning Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft. The return of the spacecraft without its crew will help NASA and Boeing continue to gather more data on Starliner during its upcoming flight home, without having more risk than necessary for its crew.
The Guardian states that Wilmore and Williams are not stranded in space and there is no failure of the Starliner, a response to other headlines say that Williams and Wilmore are stranded in space. The saga represents more of a crisis in miscommunication. The Guardian says that the commercial crew program has suggested a return date for the capsule and the astronauts Williams and Wilmore, is finally imminent.
CNN says that the Boeing Starliner had a rough flight. There are still numerous hurdles as the space agency and Boeing work to get the Starliner spacecraft to a place where it can begin flying missions with NASA astronauts on board. CNN says, “We are all happy about the successful landing, but we wish that we had planned a mission landing with Butch and Suni on board.” CNN says that they do not know if NASA would want Boeing to repeat some testing or potentially order another test flight. CNN also thinks that if on-the-ground modeling were perfect, then NASA would have trusted Starliner to bring Willmore and Williams home on Starliner's return flight.
MSNBC says that for Boeing, the Starliner's successful return was likely bittersweet. MSNBC says that Starliner launched NASA astronauts Williams and Wilmore to space in early June on the capsules first crewed test flight, a mission expected to last around eight days, but the Starliner remained parked at the space station for months as engineers on ground assessed how to bring it back to Earth safely.
After weeks of test and analysis, the thruster issues of the Starliner posed too much risk for Starliner to return with a crew. MSNBC says that Wilmore and Williams are staying on the space station into the next year and then will fly back in February on a Space X capsule. USA Today says that Williams and Wilmore are not complaining about staying in space for a couple extra weeks.
The Starliner still does not have an official return date. NASA has contingency options for returning Butch and Suni to Earth, but the focus right now is finishing up the task necessary to do so on the Starliner. I think that the Starliner should have been checked before they sent the astronauts out in it.
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