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.
Dang. You got ‘em.
You know the Eloners were praying for it to explode.
Tons of them on r/space. They and the people who have become Boeing experts since February.
You do know that “let’s get private corporations out of spaceflight entirely” might be something some people would like, yes?
Private companies have always been a big part of space flight, except it used to be only large defense contractors (Aka, Boeing, Raytheon, lockheed, etc). Honestly the situation is better now than it has ever been. But we’ll never get all private companies out of space flight, NASA can’t do it all themselves.
China does it all themselves. Russia does it all themselves. India does it all themselves. etc.
And they’re doing a real bang up job of it… Dropping tanks of Nitrogen Tetroxide and hydrazine to explode near towns. Really killing it.
And you should know, China is not doing it themselves, there are about a dozen launch companies and aerospace manufacturers making rockets in China.
The Long March 2C that carelessly drops its booster all over the place (a poorly designed rocket) is government made, but they aren’t all that way.
How is the situation better than it ever has been…?
I would be fine with “at least don’t let them self-regulate”, same with aerospace.