The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will leave the International Space Station (ISS) no later than September 6, if the weather conditions are good and no technical problems appear.
If all goes according to plan, the capsule will undock from the station at 6:04 p.m. ET (2204 GMT) on June 6, landing under parachutes six hours later at the White Sands Space Port in New Mexico, the agency said.
The Starliner spacecraft launched on June 5 on its first-ever crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station. The capsule docked successfully the next day, but the spacecraft suffered some helium leaks and five of its 28 reaction control engines failed on the way to the orbiting laboratory.
The Starliner mission, known as the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was only supposed to last 10 days or so, but NASA and Boeing continued to extend the capsule’s stay in orbit while they studied the thruster problem, seeking to understand why it occurred and whether it might reappear on Starliner’s journey to Earth.
NASA decided last weekend that the two astronauts will return to Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule in February of next year.