The troubled Boeing Starliner will depart from the International Space Station (ISS) tonight, traveling back to Earth without its crew and bringing an end to its first crewed test flight. After an issue with its thrusters was discovered during the outward journey, several months of testing have not given NASA complete confidence that the spacecraft is safe to carry crew members through the rigors of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, so the astronauts it carried will stay on the space station while the spacecraft returns home.
NASA is live-streaming the departure of the Starliner from the ISS and its landing in New Mexico, and you can watch both events through the evening and into the night.
Before the Starliner undocked, the ground control team at Starliner mission control in Houston spoke with astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore who remain on the space station. They will travel back to Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon in February next year instead. “We have your backs, and you’ve got this,” Williams told flight control. “Bring her back to Earth.”
Once it is cleared for undocking, the Starliner will be released from the hooks on the ISS docking system, and springs on the spacecraft will push it away from station. Once it is around 5 meters’ distance from the station, the Starliner will fire its thrusters to back directly away for around 200 meters, then it will move above the station.
These maneuvers will use Starliner’s forward-facing reaction control thrusters, which have been working as expected and do not include the five rear-facing reaction control thrusters that have been causing all the problems during the test flight. The thruster firing sequence will take about five minutes, and it will move the spacecraft away from the station, from where it can enter a path to carry it back to Earth.
The Starliner will come in to land at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, with touchdown scheduled for for 12:03 a.m. ET. The weather is looking good at the landing site, and you can watch a live stream of the touchdown below with coverage scheduled to begin at 10:50 p.m. ET.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.