Two Astronauts Are Left Behind in Space as Boeing’s Troubled Capsule Returns to Earth Empty

TIME

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.

Transcript

00:00NASA and Boeing safely returned the Starliner spacecraft just after 11 p.m. Central Time

00:07to the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico after spending approximately three months

00:13attached to the International Space Station. It's great to have the Starliner home.

00:18A safe and successful landing was exactly what we wanted.

00:23It was uncrewed. The systems work exactly what we wanted.

00:26It was a great day today to return Starliner. It was great to have a successful undock,

00:31the orbit and landing of the vehicle. We're really excited to have Calypso back on the ground.

00:36You know, Sonny told the ground team, you've got this. Bring Calypso back. And that's what

00:40they did tonight. I am thrilled for our Boeing team and all of our colleagues that work this

00:46mission across the country on the NASA team and the Boeing team. They've put a lot of heart and

00:52soul into this mission over many years. And it's a testament to those people that we got the vehicle

00:58back safely today. It's really great to get the spacecraft back and then we'll start the next

01:02step. So I've been talking to the Boeing team already about next steps. We want to get into

01:06the spacecraft and start working on the helium system. You know, we talked about we know we

01:12have a seal that we've got to go replace on the flanges on the RCS thrusters. We need to upgrade

01:17that material to make it hypergol compatible and then maybe a little bigger size. We'll do that.

01:23Boeing's already formed teams to look at the changes that need to be made for Starliner 1.

01:28I think it's always hard to have that retrospective look. You know, we made the decision

01:35to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the

01:40thrusters and based on the modeling that we had. And we, you know, if we'd have a model that would

01:46have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say

01:53we could have had a crewed flight. But we didn't have that. We didn't have a way to take that

01:57White Sands testing and anchor it in a model. So I think we made the right decision to not have

02:02Butch and Sonny on board. It's awfully hard for the team. It's hard for me when we sit here and

02:07have a successful landing to be in that position. But, you know, it was a test flight and we didn't

02:14have confidence in with the certainty of the thruster performance. And that's really what

02:19led us to to choose to have the uncrewed test flight.

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