Boeing’s Faulty Starliner Spacecraft Returns To Earth Safely

Boeing’s Starliner astronaut spacecraft landed safely in New Mexico, Sunday, December 22, following a failed unmanned mission.

Boeing Co’s Starliner astronaut spacecraft landed in the New Mexico desert on Sunday, the company said, after faulty software forced officials to cut short an unmanned mission aimed at taking it to the International Space Station.

The landing at 7:58 a.m. ET (1258 GMT) in the White Sands desert capped a turbulent 48 hours for Boeing’s botched milestone test of an astronaut capsule that is designed to help NASA regain its human spaceflight capabilities.

“We hit the bull’s-eye,” a Boeing spokesman said on a Livestream of the landing.

The landing will yield the mission’s most valuable test data after failing to meet its core objective of docking to the space station.