Boeing Co.’s Starliner astronaut capsule returned from the International Space Station (ISS) and landed in New Mexico on Wednesday, capping a high-stakes test flight as NASA’s next vehicle for carrying humans to orbit.
Less than a week after its launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, the CST-100 Starliner capsule plunged through Earth’s atmosphere Wednesday evening ahead of a parachute-assisted descent over the desert of White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. It touched down on time at 6:49 p.m. ET.
The roughly five-hour return trip from the space station, an orbital outpost some 250 miles above Earth, checks off the last leg of a repeat test flight that Boeing had first attempted in 2019, but failed to complete after running into software failures….