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.
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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.