SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) following Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.

It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.

The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.

SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.

This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Despite the planet’s growing plastic pollution crisis, petroleum-based polymers have become an integral part of modern life. They make cars and airplanes lighter and more energy efficient. They constitute a core material of modern medicine by helping to keep equipment sterile, deliver medicines and build prosthetics, among many other things. And they are a critical component of the wiring and hardware that underlies our technology-driven civilization.

The trouble is, when they outlive their usefulness, they become waste and end up polluting our oceans, rivers, soils and bodies.

But new research from a team of chemists at UC Berkeley suggests a glimmer of hope when it comes to the thorny problem of recycling plastics — one that may allow us to have our cake, and potentially take a very small bite, too.

The group has devised a catalytic recycling process that breaks apart the chains of some of the more commonly used plastics — polyethylene and polypropylene — in such a way that the building blocks of those plastics can be used again. In some cases, with more than 90% efficiency.

The catalysts required for the reaction — sodium or tungsten — are readily available and inexpensive, they say, and early tests show the process is likely scalable at industrial levels. It uses no water and has fewer energy requirements than other recycling methods — and is even more efficient than manufacturing new, or so-called virgin, plastics, the researchers say.

“So by making one product or two products in very high yield and at much lower temperatures, we are using some energy, but significantly less energy than any other process that’s breaking down polyolefins or taking the petroleum resources and turning them into the monomers for polyolefins in the first place,” said John Hartwig, a UC Berkeley chemist who was a co-author of the study published recently in the journal Science.

Polyolefins are a family of thermoplastics that include polyethylene — the material used to make single-use and “reusable” plastic bags — and polypropylene — the ubiquitous plastic that holds our yogurts and forms microwaveable dishes and car bumpers. Polyolefins are produced by combining small chain links, or monomers, of ethylene or propylene, which are typically obtained from oil and natural gas.

Polyethylene and polypropylene account for the majority (57%) of all polymer resins produced, the study authors noted. They have proven a plague to the environment, and in microplastic form have been found in drinking water, beer and every organ in the human body, as well as blood, semen and breast milk.

Hartwig and R.J. Conk, a graduate student who led the research, said they have not yet heard from the plastics, recycling or waste industries. They said they had been keeping their technology under wraps until publishing their paper and obtaining a patent on the process.

A spokeswoman for the Plastics Industry Association declined to comment or provide an expert to review the paper.

Hartwig said there are some caveats to the work. For instance, the plastic has to be sorted before the process can be applied. If the products are contaminated with other plastics, such as PVC or polystyrene, the outcome isn’t good.

“We don’t have a way to bring those [plastics] back to monomer, and they also poison our catalyst,” said Hartwig. “So for us, and basically for everybody else, PVC is bad. It’s not able to be chemically recycled.”

He said other contaminates — food waste, dyes, adhesives, etc. — could also potentially cause problems. However, the researchers are still early in the process.

But plastic bags, such as the ones used to hold produce in supermarkets, offer promise as they are relatively clean and “nobody knows what to do with them.” He said plastic bags are problematic for material recovery facilities where they are known to gum up machinery.

“There are places that do collect those bags. I don’t know what they do with them. Nobody wants them,” he said.

But others are less sanguine.

Neil Tangri, science and policy director at GAIA — an international environmental organization — said that while he was not a chemist or chemical engineer, and therefore couldn’t comment on the methods, he noted that there are broader “real world” issues that could prevent such a technology from taking off.

“Plastic recycling is not something we do well … we only get about 5% or 6% per year. So there’s a hunt for new technologies that will do better than that,” he said. “My basic warning is that going from small-batch analysis in the lab to functioning at scale with real-world conditions … it’s a huge, huge leap. So it’s not like we’re going to see this move into commercial production in the next year or two.”

He noted that while the reaction temperature cited was lower than that used in pyrolysis — the burning of plastic for fuel — or cracking — when plastics are made from virgin material — it still requires a lot of energy, and therefore potentially creates a fairly sizable carbon footprint. In addition, he said, 608 degrees — the reaction temperature cited — is the temperature “where dioxins like to form. So, that could be a challenge.” Dioxins are highly toxic byproducts of some industrial processes.

But, Tangri said, even if you could solve all of those issues — as well as the sorting and contamination issues Hartwig cited — “it is so cheap to make virgin plastic that the collection, the sorting, the cleaning … they were talking about … all of those steps, the energy use, you just can’t sell your [recycled material] at a price that makes sense to justify all that …. And that’s not really the fault of the technical approach. It’s the realities of the economics of plastic these days.”

It’s a point to which Lee Bell, technical and policy advisor for IPEN — a global environmental advocacy group — agrees.

“What appears promising in the lab rarely translates to commercial scale success and high yields from mixed plastic waste,” he said. “Not only do they have to deal with the diabolical issue of unavoidable plastic contamination [because chemical additives are in all plastic] but also competing with cheap virgin plastic in the marketplace.

“My view is that this is yet another lab experiment on plastic waste that will ultimately be thwarted by mixed plastic waste contamination and commercial realities,” he said.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

In a report commissioned by Congress and released this week, experts said that a number of the agency’s technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network — an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology.

“The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential,” the report said.

The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said Tuesday: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions.

“For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin. “The concerns it faces are ones that have built up over decades.”

Even as society at large has become exponentially more reliant on technology in the 60 years since NASA’s founding, federal investment in research and development has declined significantly over the decades, the study said.

This has been felt acutely at NASA, whose funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has plummeted from its Apollo-era high and remained essentially flat for decades.

NASA’s budget for years has hovered around 0.1% of total U.S. gross domestic product — less than one-eighth of its allowance during the mid-1960s.

Within the space agency, the report noted, science and technology funding has remained at a constant percentage within the budget even as missions have become far more costly and complicated.

As a result, NASA centers have only “low- to moderate-level efforts” underway to study emerging technologies that in a previous era might have been pioneered at the agency.

“NASA is a strong organization today, but it has underfunded the future NASA,” Augustine said.

The centers include JPL, where the report committee interviewed staffers at all levels of the organization.

JPL referred requests for comment to NASA.

“This report aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement provided by the agency. “We will continue to work diligently to address the committee’s recommendations — and drive our cutting-edge work on Earth, in the skies, and in the stars.”

Another key problem the report identified is neglect of NASA’s facilities, 83% of which have exceeded their designed life span. Attempts to repair and improve the agency’s infrastructure are stifled by a rule requiring a lengthy and labor-intensive review process for all requests over $1 million, a figure that has not changed since the rule’s inception despite a 30% increase in costs from inflation.

Employees at JPL in particular voiced concerns about this restriction, the report noted.

As a key example of a facility whose funding has failed to keep up with its increasing demands, the report highlighted the Deep Space Network, which makes up the world’s largest scientific telecommunications system.

JPL manages the network’s three terrestrial sites in Goldstone, Calif.; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid. The network’s budget has declined from $250 million in 2010 to roughly $200 million today, even as demands on it have increased.

As a result, the overburdened network has been forced to make costly compromises. During the Artemis I mission in late 2022, the lunar mission elbowed out all other scientific uses of the network, costing more than $21 million in data transmission from the James Webb Space Telescope alone.

The situation on the ground is not much better, the report noted. Basic infrastructure such as roads and pipes are failing at the sites, and their workforce is spread dangerously thin. Necessary maintenance and hiring would cost an estimated $45 million per year for the next 10 years, the authors wrote.

“This report is a wake-up call for NASA and political leaders,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. “It identifies critical systemic issues that are already threatening NASA’s ability to pursue its ambitious program in exploration and science, issues that have been felt but not quantified until now. We have a 20th century infrastructure for a 21st century space program.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The duo performed the historic feat, each connected by a 12-foot-long tether, in less than two hours, each outside the spacecraft for a little more than 10 minutes.

Crewmates Scott Poteet and Anna Menon remained inside the Dragon, but all four had to wear SpaceX’s new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits because the spacecraft does not have an airlock — so they were all subjected to the vacuum of space.

Isaacman led the way opening the forward hatch of Dragon as it orbited 460 miles above the planet.

“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said amid cheers from SpaceX headquarters during the company’s livestream of the event.

With the blue globe of Earth in the background, the spacecraft flew into the shadow of night as Isaacman performed a series of maneuvers while never losing contact with a mobility structure called “Skywalker” that stuck out from the end of the spacecraft.

Commander @rookisaacman has egressed Dragon and is going through the first of three suit mobility tests that will test overall hand body control, vertical movement with Skywalker, and foot restraint pic.twitter.com/XATJQhLuIZ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 12, 2024

Gillis followed, performing the same maneuvers, all part of a test of how the new suits worked for SpaceX.

The endeavor was risky in that if the hatch had not been able to close properly, the four would have had to perform an emergency landing while wearing EVA suits.

But the hatch was closed tight and the cabin repressurized successfully, which allowed the four to remove their EVA suits to continue the rest of their flight. The spacewalk began at 6:12 a.m. and ended just before 8 a.m. for a total of 1 hour and 46 minutes.

They became the 264th and 265th people to perform a spacewalk — but all previous had been under the auspices of government space agencies.

The first spacewalk came in 1965 performed by Alexei Leonov of the Soviet Union. NASA astronaut Ed White followed suit the same year.

SpaceX launches Polaris Dawn spacewalk mission taking billionaire to space for 2nd time

Polaris Dawn, which launched from Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday, is the first of up to three missions under what is called the Polaris Program led by Isaacman in partnership with SpaceX.

He made his fortune with credit-card-processing company Shift4 Payments and first flew to space in 2021 on Inspiration4. The final mission of the Polaris Program will be the first human spaceflight of SpaceX’s in-development Starship and Super Heavy.

“All of the objectives of the Polaris Program have to answer the question, ‘Does this help get us to Mars?’” Isaacman said in the months after announcing his partnership with Elon Musk’s company. “There’s a lot of learning that needs to take place as space opens up beyond just the few and into the many.

“So, spacewalk, yay. If we’re going to go to moon and make life multiplanetary, we’re going to have to leave the safety and comfort of the habitat or the vehicle to do this.”

Isaacman has declined to say how much of his own money he’s spent on any of the private missions.

The spacewalk comes halfway through the five-day mission, which saw the Crew Dragon fly to an altitude of 870 miles, the farthest for any human spacecraft in a low-Earth orbit and the highest altitude ever traveled by women. The Apollo moon missions traveled a farther distance from Earth — but not in an Earth orbit.

SpaceX snaps Earth shot during Polaris Dawn high-altitude run

The point of the altitude test was to subject Dragon to the radiation within the Van Allen belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

The mission also has a laser-based communication technology demonstration using point-to-point Starlink hardware while the quartet perform more than 30 science and research experiments on board.

They are slated to splash back down off the Florida coast in either the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic early Sunday.

The stage is set for the first private spacewalk Thursday. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman will pop out of the hatch of his orbiting SpaceX capsule, two days after blasting off from Florida on a chartered flight that lifted him and his crew higher than anyone since NASA’s moonwalkers. He partnered with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to buy a series of rocket rides and help develop brand new spacesuits.

SpaceX is the first private company to attempt a spacewalk, until now the domain of just 12 countries. There’s a reason why it’s such a niche and elite group: Spacewalking is considered the most dangerous part of any flight after launch and reentry, and demands extensive training.

“Spacewalks are a whole different entire ballgame than just strapping into a rocket and riding it, getting some zero-g time and coming back,” said retired NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy.

Cassidy knows firsthand about the dangers of spacewalking: He was working outside the International Space Station in 2013 when his partner, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, almost drowned. Parmitano’s helmet filled with water from his cooling garment, and he barely made it back inside in time. Another 30 minutes that day and “the answer might be different,” Cassidy said.

Cassidy worries there’s “a slippery slope” where the wealthy could try to jump to the front of a spacewalking line with minimal training.

Risk and disaster analyst Ilan Kelman of University College London said it’s “appropriate and inevitable” that non-professionals will end up performing spacewalks. But he anticipates fatalities along the way.

“We can and should do plenty to reduce the risk,” said Kelman. “We must be entirely honest with anyone participating, especially the low chance of rescue when something major goes wrong.”

This spacewalk attempt won’t be like what routinely happens at the International Space Station where astronauts float out to do repairs. Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis will venture just barely outside the capsule as they soar about 450 miles (more than 700 kilometers) above Earth. Their orbit was initially twice that high, but reduced for the spacewalk.

Besides being new to spacewalking, the crew of four will test suits fresh off the factory floor. All will be exposed to the vacuum of space since the Dragon capsule, unlike larger space vehicles, lacks an airlock.

For Isaacman, throwing away the cabin atmosphere and then restoring it is the riskiest part of the endeavor.

“You can’t afford to get anything wrong along that journey or you sidetrack it,” Isaacman said. “We’re going out just long enough to do what we need to do to get the data.”

The bulk of their training over the past two years has focused on the spacewalk, the highlight of their planned five-day flight. SpaceX put considerable preparation and testing into the capsule and suits, said SpaceX’s Bill Gerstenmaier, a former NASA manager.

For safety, Isaacman and Gillis will always keep a foot or hand on the capsule or the ladder-like support that they’ll position above the hatch. They will be tethered to 12-foot (3.6-meter) lines, but there will be no dangling at the end of them.

The duo will take turns emerging from the hatch, each spending 15 to 20 minutes outside as they flex and test their suits. Their crewmates — SpaceX engineer Anna Menon and former Air Force Thunderbird pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet — will monitor the spacewalk from inside.

The entire spacewalk should last no more than two hours. Isaacman has refused to say how much he invested in the flight.

To date, 263 individuals representing a dozen countries have performed spacewalks, according to NASA statistics, led by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in 1965 with NASA’s Ed White close behind.

China, the only other country to launch its own citizens into space, joined the spacewalking club in 2008. Europe, Japan, Canada and the United Arab Emirates also have seen their astronauts float outside, but always in NASA or Russian garb and under NASA or Russian control.

With SpaceX intent on getting people to the moon and Mars, “we need to start somewhere and the first step is what we’re doing on this mission,” Gillis said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA on Monday approved next month’s launch to Jupiter’s moon Europa after reviewing the spacecraft’s ability to withstand the intense radiation there.

Questions about the reliability of the transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft arose earlier this year after similar problems cropped up elsewhere. With the tight launch window looming, NASA rushed to conduct tests to verify that the electronic parts could survive the $5 billion mission to determine whether the suspected ocean beneath Europa’s icy crust might be suitable for life.

Liftoff remains scheduled for Oct. 10 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. NASA has three weeks to launch the spacecraft before standing down for more than a year to await another proper planetary alignment; the spacecraft needs to swing past Mars and then Earth for gravity assists.

Project manager Jordan Evans said the transistors — located in circuits across the entire spacecraft — are expected to degrade when Europa Clipper is exposed to the worst of the radiation during the 49 flybys of the moon. But they should recover during the three weeks between each encounter, said Evans of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Teams from labs across the country came to that conclusion following round-the-clock testing over the past four months.

The project has “high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned,” Evans said. “We are ready for Jupiter.”

It will take six years for Europa Clipper to reach Jupiter, where it will orbit the gas giant every three weeks. Dozens of flybys are planned of Europa as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers), allowing cameras and other instruments — including ice-penetrating radar — to map virtually the entire moon.

Europa Clipper is the biggest spacecraft ever built by NASA to investigate another planet, spanning more than 100 feet (30 meters) with its solar panels unfurled.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Monday, the Hampton History Museum will have a talk and tour of the exhibit “Chris Kraft: Hampton’s Unlikely Space Hero.” Allen Hoilman, the museum’s deputy director and curator, will discuss Kraft’s accomplishments and Hampton’s integral role in the Space Race of the 1950s and ’60s.

Kraft was born in Phoebus and attended Hampton High School and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) before working at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (now NASA Langley Research Center) in 1945. In 1958, he was assigned to a group to develop manned space flight – putting a man in space and bringing him home safely. Kraft was a central figure in projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

He led the development of the operations control system, Mission Control. He became the flight director, responsible for the flight components of the missions near Earth and in space. He was named director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1972 and retired in 1982. After Kraft died in 2019, his family donated to the museum a collection of personal memorabilia that he’d saved from growing up in Hampton and his career at NASA.

The exhibit will be open through March 2.

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If you go

When: 7 to 8 p.m. Monday
Where: Hampton History Museum, 120 Old Hampton Lane
Tickets: Free for museum members; others, $5
Details: hamptonhistorymuseum.org

Neopestalotiopsis disease, which first appeared several years ago in Florida, can cause light to dark brown spots on plant leaves and rotting of the fruit. To avoid it, some local growers started getting their plants from a supplier in Canada. But now, major nurseries there are also seeing symptoms, and they’ve recently warned the fruit growers.

“They are basically canceling orders (and in many cases refunding the deposit) or telling plug plant producers and farmers to take plants at their own risk — no reimbursements for bad or infected plants delivered this year,” said Phil Brannen, a professor in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Georgia, in an Aug. 21 post on the university’s cooperative extension’s website.

It’s not the first time Hampton Roads has dealt with a strawberry disease, but this one could have a major impact on growers who count on the popularity of the fruit.

“That’s a major crop that draws the consumers to the farms,” said Jayesh Samtani, associate professor and small fruit extension specialist at the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center. “It’s the first crop that gives you fruit in the spring season.”

The disease can reduce a grower’s harvest by as much as 50%, Samtani said.

“It’s scary for sure,” said Roy Flanagan, Virginia Beach’s agricultural extension agent and owner of Flanagan Farms, which offers u-pick strawberries in the spring. “It’s a new enemy of the plant that you’ve got to figure out to combat.”

Virginia Beach is the commonwealth’s largest producer of strawberries thanks to the area’s temperate climate and nutrient-rich soil. The value of the crop in Virginia Beach ranges from $750,000 to $1 million per year. Meanwhile, a strawberry farm in Virginia Beach sees an estimated 1,500 visitors each week in May, according to the city.

Some area farms were able to order healthy cutoffs, or bare root plants, from California this year before they sold out, according to Samtani. Flanagan Farms and Cullipher Farm are among those. Others will take the risk with the Canadian plants or cancel their orders.

The situation likely will have long-lasting repercussions.

“The disease has a tendency to stay in the soil from one season to another,” Samtani said. “Even next year, if your plants come in clean, it would not be advisable to use the same site.”

Cindy Weatherly, who operates a farm in Pungo and Cindy’s Produce, a farm stand on Harpers Road, will skip growing strawberries this year to avoid contamination.

“This is an aggressive strain,” Weatherly said. “I don’t want to introduce a disease into my soil that I know nothing about until I watch someone else take care of it.”

To help stave off the disease, which thrives in warm climates, some growers will receive their plants a little later than normal, Samtani said. Strawberries in southeast Virginia are typically planted from last week of September through the first week of October. Chandler, Sweet Charlie, and Ruby June varieties are mostly grown locally.

Samtani plants berries at the research center each year. He’s expecting strawberry plants to arrive Oct. 10.

The Henley family is one of the city’s largest strawberry producers, growing them across 10 acres. They received the tips of strawberry plants from a supplier in Nova Scotia and have been rooting them in trays, said farm owner Barbara Henley. She’s already noticed some signs of the disease in one of the varieties, but is on track to plant in three weeks.

“Ours look fairly good,” Henley said, also a City Council member. “I’m afraid to say too much.”

The research center is advising growers about how to mitigate the disease if plants are infected. One option is fumigating the soil, which involves injecting a synthetic chemical gas. Sanitizing clothing, equipment, machinery and pruning tools also will be critical.

And fungicidal treatments can also help keep the disease under control. However, the most effective chemical — thiram — is being phased out by the Environmental Protection Agency, Samtani said.

Some factors, like weather, will be out of the control of growers. A dry, mild spring could keep the disease at bay.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen until it all unfolds and the season progresses,” Samtani said.

Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.

Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.

It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks. For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.

Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.

Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

“She’s on her way home,” Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420 kilometers) over China and disappeared into the black void.

Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. “A good landing, pretty awesome,” said Boeing’s Mission Control.

Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

There were some snags during reentry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich said at a news conference early Saturday. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.”

Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.

Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion.

SpaceX’s crew ferry flight later this month will be its 10th for NASA since 2020. The Dragon capsule will launch on the half-year expedition with only two astronauts since two seats are reserved for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They’ve kept busy in space, helping with repairs and experiments. The two are now full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board.

Even before the pair launched on June 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Starliner’s propulsion system was leaking helium. The leak was small and thought to be isolated, but four more cropped up after liftoff. Then five thrusters failed. Although four of the thrusters were recovered, it gave NASA pause as to whether more malfunctions might hamper the capsule’s descent from orbit.

Boeing conducted numerous thruster tests in space and on the ground over the summer, and was convinced its spacecraft could safely bring the astronauts back. But NASA could not get comfortable with the thruster situation and went with SpaceX.

Flight controllers conducted more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking; one failed to ignite. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Starliner will be transported in a couple weeks back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the analyses will unfold.

NASA officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing U.S. companies transporting astronauts. The goal is for SpaceX and Boeing to take turns launching crews — one a year per company — until the space station is abandoned in 2030 right before its fiery reentry. That doesn’t give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to NASA.

Stich said post-landing it’s too early to know when the next Starliner flight with astronauts might occur.

“It will take a little time to determine the path forward,” he said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Starliner making its first crewed spaceflight arrived to the ISS on June 6, one day after launching from Cape Canaveral with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board for what was supposed to be about an eight-day stay. Now they won’t get home for at least eight months.

“NASA has decided that Butch and Sunny will return with Crew-9 in February and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference Saturday following an agency-level review of Starliner’s flight safety risk.

Dubbed the Crew Flight Test, Boeing has been trying to get Starliner certified to join SpaceX as one of two commercial providers to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. SpaceX has been doing the job from the U.S. for more than four years, and now Starliner has an uncertain future.

While trying to dock with ISS, problems with Starliner emerged with it propulsion system, when five of 28 reaction control system thrusters failed on approach. The propulsion module also suffered several helium leaks.

“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine, and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine, and so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety,” Nelson said. “Our core value is safety and it is our North Star.”

He said NASA’s decision considered the specter of the tragedies of Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia.

“This whole discussion, remember, is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past,” Nelson added. “We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward.”

What went wrong?

The problems that emerged on what had otherwise been a good trip up for Starliner to the ISS led to delays in a decision to return home while Boeing and NASA worked to figure out the source of the problem — including running a series of tests on the ground and hot firing Starliner while still attached to the ISS.

While four of the five thrusters came back online and ground tests revealed the likely cause, there remains nothing that can be done to fix the source problem now in space. The return flight could see a repeat of thruster failures, which are needed for the spacecraft’s departure from the ISS and its reentry burn to land on Earth.

“Our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different. The uncertainty in our margins is where we have come to make the decision,” NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said. “That uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters, and we still have some work to go.”

NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said the data ultimately drove the decision.

“Bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” Stich said. “If we had a model, if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action.”

He said ground testing results were a surprise to NASA and begun the shift in course where NASA began seriously considering keeping Williams and Wilmore on board the ISS and bringing Starliner home without crew.

Boeing future

While Boeing had in weeks past been stumping for a crewed return of the spacecraft to complete the mission as planned, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, earlier this month revealed there has been dissent among NASA officials worried about the risk involved to the astronauts.

No Boeing official was at Saturday’s press conference, but NASA officials gave them credit and said they thought the decision ultimately laid in NASA’s hands.

“We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS,” Nelson said, noting he had just spoken with Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg. “I have expressed this to him. I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely.”

Nelson later stated he believed “100%” that Boeing would continue with its efforts to satisfy their commercial crew contract, which calls for six Starliner flights to the ISS once the spacecraft is certified.

Boeing initially won the larger contract alongside SpaceX in 2016, but it was a fixed-price contract worth $4.2 billion for which Boeing has yet to see payout except for development costs. Years of Starliner program delays, though, including the company having to fly a do-over of its uncrewed flight test when the first go didn’t rendezvous with the ISS, have cost Boeing more than $1.6 billion to date.

“We expect delivery on the contract,” Nelson said.

NASA officials said they were looking at the requirements for certification but would not commit to say whether this completion of CFT minus humans on the way down would be good enough for certification.

Starliner’s planned departure date has not been revealed, but would come no earlier than September with a desert landing in the southwestern United States.

“We’ve accomplished a lot on this mission and learned a lot about this vehicle, satisfied a lot of the objectives,” Free said. “We’ll look at this as we do any of our missions to see does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we define as a mishap? Once we get the vehicle back, that’s our time to look at that.”

Remaining in space

Wilmore and Williams then, would become active members of Expeditions 71 and 72, and would fly home on the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom in February joining Crew-9, which slated to fly to the ISS no earlier than Sept. 24.

It’s set to fly up with two instead of four astronauts so Wilmore and Williams could take the remaining seats when that mission concludes. Which two astronauts fly up on Crew-9 and which stay home was not revealed by NASA.

The decision now stretches Williams and Wilmore stay on board the ISS to more than eight months. This is their third visit to the ISS with both having visited on both space shuttle flights as well as Russia Soyuz flights during their careers.

ISS Program Manager Dana Weigel said the long stay is not an issue since there have been some astronauts who have gone a year on board.

“While Butch and Suni are on board, they’ll be doing science station maintenance, they’ll execute the SpaceX (CRS-31) research and cargo mission, and we may have a couple spacewalks for them toward the end of their expedition,” she said.

In the last 2½ months, they’ve already completed about 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments along with critical station maintenance, she said.

“Since they’ve been up there, they’ve been a welcome set of helping hands,” she said.

Norm Knight, the head of NASA’s Flight Operations Directorate, said every astronaut understands the chance a mission could go longer than planned.

“They’re professionals. When they launch, they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year,” he said. “So mentally, you know that you could be in that situation. Now, once you’re in the arena, obviously it’s a little different. It’s challenging. You know, it’s disappointing that that they’re not coming home on Starliner, but that’s OK. It’s a test flight. That’s what we do.”