Boeing And NASA's Starliner To Embark On Solo Return Journey This Friday

Boeing's Starliner, the space craft that has been more soap opera than space drama, is readying for its grand finale this Friday-except there is one tiny plot twist: it's going to fly solo, with no crew aboard. After a mission that has been a check-list of "What could go wrong?", NASA and Boeing are opting for the cautious homecoming sans humans. Think of this as sending your self-driving car for a road test-but in space.

This was, of course, a high-stakes journey that was supposed to be Starliner's moment to shine-a pivotal certification mission before it became a routine Uber-for-astronauts. But a few hiccups along the way-including some decidedly temperamental thrusters and helium leaks-meant a bit of rewiring on both the literal and figurative level. But even with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams making it to the ISS safely, NASA apparently decided flying them home in Starliner would be tempting fate-so they're hitching a ride home on the far more tried-and-tested SpaceX Dragon in February 2025.

Meanwhile, the solo Starliner will conduct a "breakout burn," a series of gentle thrusts intended to separate itself from ISS. For a craft that has seen its fair share of grounding at the mercy of technical gremlins, this is, in essence, a cosmic trust fall. It will then conduct a 60-second deorbit burn and deploy its parachutes and airbags-essentially preparing for a soft touchdown like an extreme version of a feather bed landing, only with a $1.5 billion price tag.

NASA and Boeing are prepared for this return with layers of redundancy, but just as last-minute changes might alter a wedding schedule, so too might the undocking reschedule if Friday doesn't prove to be quite the perfect day for landing. The return of Starliner is not a finale but a cliffhanger: will Boeing get its cherished spacecraft up and certified to fly regular missions? Or is there another costly test flight in the cards? The Starliner saga keeps evolving, but one thing remains clear: space is the final frontier, but it has nothing on this vast corporate epic.