Photo credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner astronaut crew capsule made a successful landing in the White Sands desert on Sunday, a mission where two days earlier it failed to reach the orbit needed to dock with the International Space Station. A software problem on Friday caused the capsule to fail to reach the correct orbit needed to rendezvous with the space station. Read more for a video and additional information.
The landing tested the capsule’s difficult reentry into the atmosphere and parachute deployment, yielding the mission’s most valuable test data after it failed to meet one of its core objectives of docking to the ISS. After touching down, teams of engineers inspected the capsule, whose six airbags cushioned its impact on the desert surface as planned.
