Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landed in a New Mexico desert late on Friday, months after its original departure date and without the two astronauts it carried when it launched in early June.
Starliner returned to Earth seemingly without a hitch, a Nasa live stream showed, nailing the critical final phase of its mission.
The spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 11pm ET at orbital speeds of roughly 27,400km/h (17,025mph). 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 White Sands Space Harbor, an arid desert in New Mexico.
How is the situation better than it ever has been…?
Well, we have multiple launch vehicles, we have multiple crew capsules, multiple cargo vehicles, and just about all of them are cheaper than our previous options. The crew capsules we’re using now are all several orders of magnitude safer than the space shuttle (even the Starliner in it’s current state is an order of magnitude safer than the shuttle). And now we have options that don’t require us to negotiate with Russia to use them.