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Starliner returns to Earth after successful maiden voyage to the ISS – TechCrunch


Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft successfully landed at the White Sands Rocket Range in New Mexico after carrying a payload to the International Space Station – its first successful orbital mission. While not everything goes exactly as planned, this success could establish Boeing as a much-needed second-party supplier of commercial ISS launch capabilities.

Starliner released last Thursday and docked at ISS Fridaystayed for a long weekend while the crew unloaded food and other essentials from within the capsule and performed live checks of its systems.

It split earlier today and went down to orbit where it could have started down with a burn mark. After removing the service module, power supply and propulsion during flight, it oriented its heat shield to take up the impact of the atmosphere, reaching about 3,000 degrees during landing. .

Here’s footage of the Starliner’s fiery journey from an aircraft tracking it at 50,000 feet:

The craft quickly deviated from the slide and landed on schedule and on target (one-third of a mile away, essentially “an ox’s eye”) in the New Mexico desert, where it was Boeing and NASA ground teams recovered. .

Animation of Starliner hovering under three parachutes.

Image credits: Boeing / NASA / YouTube

The spacecraft had a bit of a hiccup during its ascent last week, with two of its thrusters shutting down due to pressure issues, but other than that everything went pretty well. If Boeing can convince NASA that it has fixed the problem, they may be looking at a serious opportunity in the future.

The US began the process of phasing out Russia’s Soyuz capsules years before it began to prove financially and politically unfeasible, and the Crew and Commercial Resupply projects aimed to produce American-made spacecraft capable of delivering supplies and people to the ISS as close to 100% safety as possible.

SpaceX completed the task more quickly and efficiently than Boeing, which suffered from the anomaly of an upstart doing better than it was manually. But while SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft has proven reliable and now makes regular trips to the ISS, we all know the risks of putting all our eggs in one basket – especially if the basket that’s owned by someone like Elon Musk. So even though the last few years have been Boeing’s best plane in many respects, there’s still hope that the Starliner will eventually emerge as a real alternative.

The market for sending anything to space is of course huge, and although the ISS is on track for the long term, there is bound to be a successor of some sort, let alone the multitude of projects on the program. Artemis. This is a hugely important step forward for Boeing in proving it can provide these services.



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