Starliner Astronauts Return To Earth After More Than 9 Months In Space (cnn.com) 94
NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 has returned to Earth safely after a stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station. The crew remained in space longer than expected due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which was originally scheduled to bring them home sooner.
While the mission has been politically fraught, the astronauts said in a rare space-to-earth interview last month that they were neither stranded nor abandoned. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..." CNN has more details on the arrival: Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET. The crew's highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET. Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov spent Tuesday morning and afternoon in orbit in the roughly 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Gradually descending, the capsule carried the astronauts from the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, toward the thick inner layer of our planet's atmosphere.
Around 5 p.m. ET, the Crew Dragon capsule began firing its engines to begin the final phase of the journey: reentry. This leg of the journey is considered the most dangerous of any flight home from space. The jarring physics of hitting the atmosphere while traveling more than 22 times the speed of sound routinely heats the exterior of returning spacecraft to more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,926 degrees Celsius) and can trigger a communication blackout. After plunging toward home, the Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed two sets of parachutes in quick succession to further slow its descent. The capsule decelerated from orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour) to less than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) as the vehicle hit the ocean.
After the vehicle hit the ocean, a SpaceX rescue ship waiting nearby worked to haul the spacecraft out of the water. Williams and Wilmore and their crewmates will soon exit Dragon and take their first breaths of earthly air in nine months. Medical teams will evaluate the crew's health, as is routine after astronauts return from space, before deciding next steps. Ultimately, the NASA crew members will return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can watch a recording of the re-entry and splashdown here.
While the mission has been politically fraught, the astronauts said in a rare space-to-earth interview last month that they were neither stranded nor abandoned. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..." CNN has more details on the arrival: Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET. The crew's highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET. Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov spent Tuesday morning and afternoon in orbit in the roughly 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Gradually descending, the capsule carried the astronauts from the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, toward the thick inner layer of our planet's atmosphere.
Around 5 p.m. ET, the Crew Dragon capsule began firing its engines to begin the final phase of the journey: reentry. This leg of the journey is considered the most dangerous of any flight home from space. The jarring physics of hitting the atmosphere while traveling more than 22 times the speed of sound routinely heats the exterior of returning spacecraft to more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,926 degrees Celsius) and can trigger a communication blackout. After plunging toward home, the Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed two sets of parachutes in quick succession to further slow its descent. The capsule decelerated from orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour) to less than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) as the vehicle hit the ocean.
After the vehicle hit the ocean, a SpaceX rescue ship waiting nearby worked to haul the spacecraft out of the water. Williams and Wilmore and their crewmates will soon exit Dragon and take their first breaths of earthly air in nine months. Medical teams will evaluate the crew's health, as is routine after astronauts return from space, before deciding next steps. Ultimately, the NASA crew members will return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can watch a recording of the re-entry and splashdown here.
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Mod parent funnier and remove mod points of censorious trolls. Even better idea for punishment: If any of the trolls are human, make them read a book.
No (Score:3)
Their feelings on the matter are irrelevant. It doesn't matter if they were prepared for it. It doesn't matter how committed they are. It wasn't supposed to happen. Glad they were prepared and could handle it, but that isn't the point, and it never was.
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> SpaceX rocket explodes, raining debris from sky for second time in a row
There were no people on board, they're still testing it. This was clearly a failure for them, but it's literally rocket science and they're still outdoing the entire rest of the world combined in launches, so I'm not really worried about an unmanned test rocket failing again.
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So far, Starship appears to be going through the development cycle that was revolutionized with the Soviet N1.
By any metric, anywhere else in the world, the entire rocket would be considered a failure many times over. The Soviets would have shot the person responsible for it by now.
That all being said- I'm glad work is still chugging away on Starship.
But the double standard is real.
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Weren't there multiple falcon 9 failures too?
I'm not a fan of Musk, but I'm not convinced this is a shockingly worse development cycle than the falcon 9.
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Lots of booster landing failures, of course. But I don't think anyone counts that as a launch failure, as the boosters were disposable anyway, with recovery being a long term goal.
I'm pretty sure the Starship upper stage either holds the current record for the most exploded rocket in history, or is working on catching it.
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1 that I know of.
Lots of booster landing failures, of course. But I don't think anyone counts that as a launch failure, as the boosters were disposable anyway, with recovery being a long term goal.
I'm pretty sure the Starship upper stage either holds the current record for the most exploded rocket in history, or is working on catching it.
Elon Musk's favorite SpaceX explosions, posted 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Ya, I remember that. All booster recovery kabooms, except for one.
There are others. Here's another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have a success rate of 99.35% and have been launched 463 times over 15 years, resulting in 460 full successes, two in-flight failures (SpaceX CRS-7 and Starlink Group 9–3), one pre-flight failure (AMOS-6 while being prepared for an on-pad static fire test), and one partial failure (SpaceX CRS-1, which delivered its cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), but a secondary payload was stranded in a lower-than-planned orbit).
CRS-7 was the one I was th
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Which is all well and good, but if you get down to it, not that different from the shuttles 98.52% success rate. True, none of the failures for the Falcon 9 were fatal like the 2 shuttle ones, but then the shuttle carried passengers every single time. From what I can find, only 15 of those flights were manned. So that would be 3.24% of flights. If the shuttle only carried passengers on that percentage of flights, odds of any deaths would have been pretty low that there would have been any deaths from the sh
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My argument is that the development of Falcon 9 went excellently. Shuttle also went excellently.
Very few kabooms. To the contrary, Starship is getting along about like the Soviet N1.
I have no criticisms of the F9 program whatsoever. It's been a rockstar.
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I get it, just saying that it's a good success rate, but not overwhelmingly so. Plus of course the record might look a bit different if it had been carrying people during its failures. Then again, the shuttle had pretty much no option for sparing the crew in a disaster whereas it's a requirement for man-rated rockets today. It should have always been a requirement for the shuttle, of course, but there were always a lot of bad design and operation decisions for the shuttle based on political considerations.
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We were talking about the development cycle of the Falcon 9.
The development of the upper stage went great- the development of the booster was rougher- lots of kabooms during recovery attempts.
The fact that booster recovery failures are now very rare isn't even relevant to the conversation.
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Asking me how I'd interpret my statement devoid of the entire conversation's context is a stupid question.
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There you go, the always famous method of response, escalation.
What are you talking about?
Telling you to correct the elementary error that led you to saying something stupid is not an escalation. I'm trying to help you be less stupid.
Truth is you just realized you got your information all wrong and you acted up, calling people stupid to shift attention to something else so that you don't look like you just messed up.
You're trying to pretend the context doesn't exist. That isn't clever. In fact, it's quite stupid.
I'll spell it out for you, because I'm feeling charitable today.
Person A:
Weren't there multiple falcon 9 failures too?
Me:
Lots of booster landing failures, of course. But I don't think anyone counts that as a launch failure, as the boosters were disposable anyway, with recovery being a long term goal.
Person C:
Elon Musk's favorite SpaceX explosions, posted 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch [youtube.com]?... [youtube.com]
Me:
Ya, I remember that. All booster recovery kabooms, except for one.
You:
Where are you getting this information from? From my data that I get from SpaceX itself, they attempted to land/catch boosters 432 times, 420 successful.
As you can see, we're discussing the development process of Starship, and the Falcon 9.
Some guy says, "hey didn't a lot of Falcon 9s explode too?
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You are ignoring the "test" flights of Falcon1 where merlin engine was first used, that experienced three consecutive launch failures, with the first two attributed to fuel leaks and the third to a timing error during stage separation
Starship is no N1, having actually left the launch pad repeatedly without rud
The Boeing Starliner, on the other hand was supposed to be human-rated and was on an occupied test flight when NASA decided they could not depend on the thrusters to operate properly
Getting the astrona
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Thank you for playing, though.
Starship is no N1, having actually left the launch pad repeatedly without rud
Well, to be fair, they only worked on the N1 for 3 years ;)
Starship is on its way to year 5.
The Boeing Starliner, on the other hand was supposed to be human-rated and was on an occupied test flight when NASA decided they could not depend on the thrusters to operate properly
How is this relevant to this conversation??
Getting the astronauts back was planned months ago and has nothing to do with who is in the WH
Hi, welcome to the discussion, where you'll see this is entirely what was debated, and you're telling this to the person who agrees with that sentiment. But uhhh, thanks?
You should check out the development steps leading to the current centaur 2nd stage before giving starship any awards for being the most explody
Eh?
"Centaur" is such a complicated multi-dimensional context that I'm afraid you're going to have to be mo
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Starship is on its way to year 5.
Curious how you get under five years of development time. Is this by counting from when they switched to stainless steel?
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I count it all the way back to at least the initial stages in 2012. Some might even count it back to 2009. That's one of my problems with Musk's marketing of SpaceX's design process as superior: the fact that it has taken Starship about twice as long as the Saturn V and it's still not ready for prime time. However, if you counted the Saturn V's development from the equivalent point in its own development, that would be 1 year, one month and 12 days. So that would make Starship take at least 4.5 times as lon
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I'm not a fan of Musk, but I'm not convinced this is a shockingly worse development cycle than the falcon 9.
It seems to be worse than, for example, the Saturn V though. Pinpointing a concrete date for the start of development is tricky, but it seems like it's been about twice as long as the Saturn V.
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The first three Falcon launches failed. The first one actually failed twice, once on the pad and once in the air.
They weren't test launches either, they were carrying real payloads. For the fourth launch they decided to do an actual test launch with no payload and it succeeded.
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Falcon 9 is a successor of Falcon 1. It wasn't intended to be, but ended up as kind of a scaled down development version of Falcon 9.
The current Starship isn't the same design as the one two launches ago, and both of those are explicitly scaled down test models. You can't really decide Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are completely separate things and then go and lump all the Starship explosions together.
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You could call Starhopper to Starship an equivalent analogy to F1 to F9, but to say that F1 to F9 is the same as Starship morphology evolution, then give me a fucking break.
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Ah, I decided you weren't being a serious person when you mentioned the Soviets shooting Elon Musk.
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Is that what you took from it?
There was no "Elon Musk", it was a hypothetical lead of a Soviet Space Program.
The shooting was a embellishment, of course- but sent to a labor camp? Plausible.
Korolev barely dodged a bullet in the Great Purge, and ended up spending a year in a gulag, and 6 years in prison afetr that.
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This wasn't flaming NASA, other than their choice to allow Boeing anywhere near them. SpaceX sucks dick.
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There was never some kind of mythical ability for them to leave whenever they wanted.
As they said- that's the spaceflight program.
Had there been an emergency, they could have come home early. There wasn't, and so it was "whenever it was expedient."
I, for the fucking life of me, can't figure out how in the fuck you feel like you're somehow entitled to to replace these peoples understanding of the mission they signed up for,
Re: No (Score:1)
Without commenting on this situation in particular, generally it should be reasonable to assume that the comments of the astronauts are also obviously politically motivated and represents the view that their employer wants them to a represent and not some genuine expression of their lived experience.
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Why was a new rocket not spun up instantly to bring them back? Because the better plan, in the eyes of NASA, was to bring them home on Crew-9.
As was the plan back in 2024 [factcheck.org].
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Actually, I think it could be argued that it always was the plan, it was just that it was the contingency part of the plan.
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They were stranded
No, they were not.
they weren't supposed to be there for most a year and will have lifelong damsge to their bodies because they were stranded.
They were supposed to be there a year once the mission plan was changed for them to be there a year, last August.
A ride home has been sitting up there ever since.
Taking it would have meant depriving the ISS of an emergency ride home.
Launching a rocket out of cadence would have meant spending money that didn't exist.
Repurposing a supply rocket to be crewed would have fucked the entire program to shit.
The non-emergency nature of the situation
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Keep sucking that Boeing and SpaceX dick. They'll definitely reward you one day.
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You're a fucking moron.
See? just an adjective. No need to be scared of it.
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I never said it was expedient, or an emergency. I don't care if the mission was two weeks or 8 years. There was never a reason to trust or allow Boeing into the Commercial Crew Program. The program wouldn't even be necessary if NASA was funded properly, but they haven't been for decades.
There was nothing political or partisan about this, you degenerate fucktard.
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There was nothing political or partisan about this, you degenerate fucktard.
In the context of their "feelings" being that they were not "stranded", I took that to mean: "they were stranded, regardless of how they feel."
Assertion of them being stranded, is indeed political, and it's an absurd use of the word in this context, only peddled by very political animals.
Now, If I misread where you were going with that- then I apologize. If I didn't, I stand by my judgement of you as a partisan parasite.
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No. I was not implying that they were still stranded. I've always thought the Boeing Starliner was going to be a bad idea or end up causing more issues than it solves. The astronauts want to change the narrative that everything was fine. I want that narrative to remember, that Boeing created a whole fuckton of extra headaches for NASA. NASA compensated the best they could. SpaceX isn't much better, but with the extra fuckup of also delaying commercial flights on a regular basis.
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Uh, not the longest layover ever. That would be this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
His layover was 23 times longer.
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Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
They're both test pilots. It was a test flight.
Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Starliner Astronauts Return To Earth After More Than 9 Months In Space
And then DOGE fired them. :-)
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As Boeing Test Pilots, are they even Federal Employees?
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As Boeing Test Pilots, are they even Federal Employees?
Does that even matter to this Administration? :-/
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So filing their overtime reports right now then...? ;-)
Hah- one would hope so! But probably not... because Government.
I wonder if Boeing has to pay something for their accommodation?
What an interesting proposition... But I doubt it, due to how Government contracts are structured.
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So filing their overtime reports right now then...? ;-)
I know that's meant to be a joke, but they don't get overtime. They're salaried NASA employees. They get paid the same whether they're in space or on the ground. I imagine they have not gotten to take their vacation time while in space and I hope it continued to accrue and didn't hit some maximum after which additional time just vanishes. Other than that it should be pretty much same old same old as far as salary and benefits go (although I am not sure how health benefits work while you're in space).
There s
Re:Lets be clear about what they're evading (Score:5, Insightful)
There were earlier options for bringing them back, but the Biden administration demurred because they didn't want to give the "win" to persona non grata Mr. Musk.
BULLSHIT
As soon as it was determined that the Boeing ship was unsafe, the return plan was to "give the win to persona non grata Mr Musk" by having them come back on the SpaceX ship.
The only question from that point on was how and when to do that. Do we ship them back as cargo in the SpaceX ship that was already there (dangerous)? Do we send a SpaceX ship just to pick them up and bring them back (big cost)? Do we bump two astronauts off of the next planned SpaceX ship (only sending two up) and then have all four astronauts come back together on the SpaceX ship (compromise)?
All the solutions were SpaceX -aka Musk.
It was not a "BIDEN HATES MUSK" issue, it was a question of which MUSK option is best. For the astronauts. For NASA. For the mission.
Fuck your need to politicize everything.
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The issue was, as I heard, that there was a political calculation about trying to bring them home before the 2024 election in November
The problem, is that this is hearsay, and multiple actual fucking astronauts publicly said it was a bald-faced lie. Musk then proceeded to call them idiots.
The story, as told by people who are not Musk, or Trump, was that it was a simple decision to fold them into the normal rotation to avoid the cost of an expedited launch that frankly wasn't in their budget, or their plans.
Im not so certain if the test pilots were stranded, or felt stranded, they would have felt free to say that while they were, uhm stranded.
Ok. My cousin was stranded in Afghanistan for 4 years.
Before that, my Great Uncle was stranded in Germany for I think 6.
I think, wh
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Let's also not forget that, if they really wanted to, they could have hopped into an already docked capsule and just gone back down to Earth basically any time. It's not even the military, they would not have been considered AWOL or anything like that.
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Something along the lines of "theft and destruction of $150 million dollars in US Government Property", lol.
I believe that gets you 10 years in Federal Prison per count of >$100USD in damage.
Hopefully they don't count all the bells and whistles on the capsule separately...
But ultimately- yes- an emergency escape was always there. They weren't stranded. They were on a mission that was extended. A m
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Uhhh, I'm quite certain that whatever they would have been considered would probably be worse than AWOL.
Something along the lines of "theft and destruction of $150 million dollars in US Government Property", lol.
I believe that gets you 10 years in Federal Prison per count of >$100USD in damage.
Hopefully they don't count all the bells and whistles on the capsule separately...
Well, according to what I can find on International Space Law:
Any astronaut from any nation is an “envoy of mankind,” and signatory states must provide all possible help to astronauts when needed, including emergency landing in a foreign country or at sea.
I think there's a very clear argument there that use of a "lifeboat" by astronauts who feel endangered would in fact be covered by "all possible help". NASA administrators and politicians might have steam coming out of their ears over it, but I think they would have a strong argument under the law. Especially after certain politicians and space company CEOs/politicans/unelected deep state bureaucrats/whatever he is made a very big deal about them
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Whoops. messed up on the URL in that link: International Space Law [spacefoundation.org]
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Citation needed. Please choose a citation or citations that explains who was supposed to pay for that, and how that would better coincide with the work plans at the ISS for the last half year and the next half year (which is reasonable given that Crew-11 will occur at July or thereafter).
Re:Lets be clear about what they're evading (Score:4, Insightful)
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As soon as it was determined that the Boeing ship was unsafe, the return plan was to "give the win to persona non grata Mr Musk" by having them come back on the SpaceX ship.
It took NASA a month to determine that Starliner was not safe for a crewed return. I expect there was a lot of politics involved in that decision.
The only question from that point on was how and when to do that. Do we ship them back as cargo in the SpaceX ship that was already there (dangerous)?
That option was considered safer than returning on the Boeing craft. Again, I suspect politics influenced that decision. Whether or not the delays were to push a potentially catastrophic return to Earth to beyond the general election would be impossible to tell without claims of mind reading. It would be difficult to determine definitively which is more danger
Re:Lets be clear about what they're evading (Score:4, Informative)
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Stop spreading absurd lies. Here is a very clear description [arstechnica.com] of what actually happened:
The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August. The spacecraft that brought them back to Earth on Tuesday safely docked to the space station in September. They could have come home at any time since. NASA--not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making--decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.
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Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.
The entire ISS program is full of politically motivated decisions.
The original plan was for the ISS to have a low inclination orbit so it could serve as a waypoint for missions to the moon, Mars, or other stops in deep space. Because there was a decision to include the Soviets in the ISS program the orbit was changed so that launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome could get to the ISS with a reasonable payload. It's not that they could not have put the ISS in an orbit that would make the ISS a useful waypoi
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Orangeshit! (Score:2)
PROVIT or SHOVIT! Strong claims require strong evidence.
A rescue mission would have thrown off the rotation schedule, cost big money, and possibly left the station under-personed, risking run-away maintenance headaches.
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Re:No mention of Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
If NASA had contracted Boeing back in 2024 instead of SpaceX, would we have mentioned Dave Calhoun?
That's what so fucking hilarious about you parasites.
You can't fucking tell that you're the ones being partisan.
Re: No mention of Musk (Score:4, Informative)
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If Boeing could actually make a functioning vehicle, we wouldn't be talking about it.
In fact, it turned out (when they flew the vehicle home unmanned) that the vehicle worked fine; they could have flown home on the Starliner with no problem. But NASA was excessively cautious (with good reason. They should be excessively cautious.)
Everyone knows biden did this,
Huh? I doubt Biden was involved in NASA scheduling decisions at all. Trips up and down to space station are tightly scheduled; NASA doesn't have a garage full of spare rockets and Dragon capsules around and they could just fly one up like calling an uber; and the s
Welcome back to earth (Score:2)
Please do not mind the gentle pull of gravity on your souls, we kinda have to live with it the whole life.
Hero or Zero (Score:3)
So what status did Sun Williamson have when she went up to the ISS? Qualified, competent, experienced
So, what status does she have now? How long before she gets slated as a "DEI hire"?
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Boeing's effort is new but they may prove valuable (Score:2)