(CNN) –– After 12 weeks in space, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will finally return home from the International Space Station on September 6, although without its crew of two.
The troubled spacecraft will undock from the orbiting lab around 6 p.m. (Miami time), and spend about six hours maneuvering closer to home before landing around midnight at New Mexico’s White Sands Spaceport.
The astronauts who traveled aboard the Starliner to the space station on June 5, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will remain aboard the orbiting laboratory.
NASA advertisement on August 24 that experts were concerned about gas leaks and problems with the Starliner capsule’s propulsion system, leading the agency to determine that the spacecraft is not safe enough to finish its mission with a crew on board. .
“The Starliner spacecraft will make a fully autonomous uncrewed return, with flight controllers at the Starliner Mission Control Center in Houston and the Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida,” according to a statement. update from NASA published this Thursday. “Teams on the ground can remotely command the spacecraft through the maneuvers necessary for safe undocking, reentry, and parachute-assisted landing in the southwestern United States.”
The performance of the Starliner vehicle during its return journey could be crucial to the future of Boeing’s overall program.
If the spacecraft suffers an accident or NASA ultimately decides not to certify the vehicle for human spaceflight (a move that would prepare the vehicle for routine trips to orbit), it would mark yet another blow to Boeing’s already damaged reputation.
Repeating this test flight and implementing redesigns on Starliner could cost the company millions of dollars, on top of the approximately $1.5 billion the company has already recorded in losses on the Starliner program.
“We all wanted to complete the (Boeing Starliner) test flight with a crew, and I think we are unanimously disappointed that we couldn’t do that,” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said last week. But “we don’t want that disappointment to negatively influence our decision.”
Even if Starliner’s uncrewed return trip goes well, NASA will still face a crucial decision about whether to grant the spacecraft its human spaceflight certification even though it did not complete its mission as planned.
During the weeks that engineers on the ground worked to understand the problems and propellant leaks affecting the Starliner, Boeing maintained that it believed the vehicle would be safe to bring astronauts Williams and Wilmore home.
In a statement on August 24, Boeing said it “continues to focus, first and foremost, on crew and spacecraft safety. “We are executing the mission as determined by NASA and are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”
Williams and Wilmore will return home aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule no earlier than February. The Crew Dragon spacecraft has been certified to carry out missions with astronauts for about four years and has made around a dozen manned trips to orbit.
