Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landed in a New Mexico desert late on Friday, months after its original departure date and without the two astronauts it carried when it launched in early June.
Starliner returned to Earth seemingly without a hitch, a Nasa live stream showed, nailing the critical final phase of its mission.
The spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 11pm ET at orbital speeds of roughly 27,400km/h (17,025mph). About 45 minutes later, it deployed a series of parachutes to slow its descent and inflated a set of airbags moments before touching down at the White Sands Space Harbor, an arid desert in New Mexico.
Boeing killed John Barnett
I like the part where they waited until after markets closing to take a chance. Also note how NASA announced that astronauts were staying after markets closed.
But number go up?!?
Meet: The Interrobang. ‽ Combination of two types of punctuation that indicates both at once.
Right choice, play it safe. Glad it landed safely, competition in space is a good thing. Better than a monopoly.
Amazing. Given Boeings recent track record, I didn’t expect it to do that.
People are (rightfully) raking Starliner and Boeing for the shitshow that has been this project so far. But the positive to take from this flight, even landing without the crew, is the fact that the capsule itself performed fine. It was the service module that was being screwy. The actual “capsule” part in “capsule” seems to have had it’s issues ironed out. Just fix the shitty service module.
Alex baumgardner jumped from the balloon from basically space, why haven’t they figured out a way to do it from low orbit yet?
Because he wasn’t moving very fast… To be in orbit you need to be traveling around the earth extremely quickly. The problem is slowing down, not the altitude.
And the ionosphere is the dangerous part. Bellow that, drag slows you down before you burn.
Because he jumped while in the stratosphere (middle level of 3-level atmosphere surrounding the earth). Therefore he didn’t have to manage the friction and heat that space shuttles have to endure when they enter the uppermost mesosphere, then stratosphere, then troposphere.
Felix?
Was that his name?
👽 Hi
Fucking piece of shit Boeing. Cant believe they would land a god damn spacecraft safely back on Earth. We need to gut them and give all our money to Elon. /s
Dang. You got ‘em.
You know the Eloners were praying for it to explode.
You do know that “let’s get private corporations out of spaceflight entirely” might be something some people would like, yes?
I would be fine with “at least don’t let them self-regulate”, same with aerospace.
Private companies have always been a big part of space flight, except it used to be only large defense contractors (Aka, Boeing, Raytheon, lockheed, etc). Honestly the situation is better now than it has ever been. But we’ll never get all private companies out of space flight, NASA can’t do it all themselves.
China does it all themselves. Russia does it all themselves. India does it all themselves. etc.
And they’re doing a real bang up job of it… Dropping tanks of Nitrogen Tetroxide and hydrazine to explode near towns. Really killing it.
And you should know, China is not doing it themselves, there are about a dozen launch companies and aerospace manufacturers making rockets in China.
The Long March 2C that carelessly drops its booster all over the place (a poorly designed rocket) is government made, but they aren’t all that way.
I didn’t realize all of those countries were China. We can also add in Japan. Which I guess is also China?
How is the situation better than it ever has been…?
Well, we have multiple launch vehicles, we have multiple crew capsules, multiple cargo vehicles, and just about all of them are cheaper than our previous options. The crew capsules we’re using now are all several orders of magnitude safer than the space shuttle (even the Starliner in it’s current state is an order of magnitude safer than the shuttle). And now we have options that don’t require us to negotiate with Russia to use them.
Tons of them on r/space. They and the people who have become Boeing experts since February.
