Boeing Starliner Lands in New Mexico After Clock Error Prompts Early Return

Jim Chilton, senior vice president of the space and launch division at Boeing, estimated that the mission obtained enough data to fulfill 85 to 90 percent of the test objectives.

“The vessel looks great,” Mr. Chilton said. “They’re telling us there’s hardly any charring, perfectly level on her airbags. And that bodes really well for reusability.”

The Starliner capsule will be transported back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will be refurbished. Each capsule is designed to fly up to 10 times, and this one is currently scheduled to head to space again, this time with astronauts, in the second half of 2020.

Before then, Boeing is to fly another test flight, but with astronauts aboard.

Steve Stich, deputy manager of the commercial crew program for NASA, said teams from the agency and Boeing will spend weeks analyzing the data.

“To me, there’s good data out there that suggests that once we go through it, maybe it’s acceptable to go, next step, fly the crewed flight test,” Mr. Stich said. “But we have to go through the data first.”

Mr. Chilton agreed that it was too early to say whether the next Starliner flight will have astronauts aboard. “We’re not in position to propose that and we don’t propose it until we know the machine is worthy,” he said.

About half an hour before landing, thrusters fired for 55 seconds to drop the spacecraft out of orbit. That set off an automated choreography — jettisoning pieces no longer needed, deploying parachutes, inflating the airbags — that appeared to unfold flawlessly. The capsule touched down in the freezing desert before sunrise near a former space shuttle runway.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/boeing-starliner-landing.html?emc=rss&partner=rss