Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has landed in New Mexico, wrapping up a three-month test mission that faced technical issues and forced it to leave the two astronauts it carried temporarily stranded in space.
The spacecraft touched down at White Sands Space Harbor in the New Mexico desert at 04:01 GMT on Saturday. The two crew members it had flown to space – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – remained at the International Space Station (ISS) due to safety concerns with the craft.
They are expected to return to Earth next February.
Starliner’s six-hour trek to Earth concluded seemingly without a hitch, a NASA livestream showed, nailing the critical final phase of its mission despite earlier problems with its thrusters.
The spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 11pm on Friday (03:00 GMT on Saturday). About 45 minutes later, it deployed a series of parachutes to slow its descent and inflated a set of airbags moments before touching down at the New Mexico spaceport at 12:01am (04:01 GMT).
The mission was intended to be a final test flight before US space agency NASA certifies Starliner for routine missions. However, the agency’s decision to keep astronauts off the capsule over safety concerns has thrown the craft’s certification path into uncertainty, despite the clean return Boeing executed.
Wilmore and Williams, whose mission was initially planned for just eight days, must return to Earth on a vehicle from Boeing’s rival SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, in February 2025.
“It must be demoralising in a way when you’ve gone expecting to be up there for eight days and suddenly your mission turns into eight months,” Tanya Harrison, a fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Outer Space Institute, told media.
“At the same time this is a highly trained crew that knows that stuff like this can happen … they’re trained, they’re ready,” she said.
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