Starliner is planned to be released Returning to Earth from the International Space Station on September 6 at 6:04 p.m. ET. If the weather cooperates and the spacecraft leaves the ISS as planned, it will touch down at White Sands Spaceport in New Mexico around 12:03 a.m. ET on September 7, using parachutes to slow its descent and deploy its airbags. Teams at Starliner Mission Control in Houston and the Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida can remotely control the spacecraft if necessary, making it an unmanned, fully autonomous flight for Starliner.
NASA recently announced that astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be on board the Starliner for the first crewed flight to the ISS. SpaceX comes home with Crew Dragon instead of. Wilmore and Williams flew to the ISS in June and were scheduled to spend just over a week in the orbiting lab. On the way there, five of the spacecraft’s maneuvering thrusters failed, worsening the helium leak problem that had previously caused the launch to be aborted. Engineers on the ground conducted tests with the help of astronauts on the ISS to determine if the Starliner was safe for the crew to return to Earth. In the end, NASA decided it was safer for Wilmore and Williams to return home in a SpaceX vehicle because “there was too much uncertainty” surrounding the Starliner’s thrusters.
The space agency will Stream the return of the Starliner live NASA+, the NASA app and on its website. As for the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which replaces Boeing’s vehicle on the ISS, it is scheduled to launch no earlier than September 24. Instead of flying with four astronauts as planned, it will fly with two – NASA astronaut Nick Haig and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander. Gorbunov – Two seats will remain vacant for the return flight with Wilmore and Williams in February 2025.
