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.
Someone who’s worked their entire life to not only become trained as an astronaut, but actually go on a space mission. What do you think they prefer? Going home today or staying another few months on an actual space station?
That makes me wonder. What happens if an astronaut just…refuses to come back? They’re up on the station and their mission is at its end. They broadcast to NASA. “Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.” How would NASA handle that situation?
Ed Baldwin, is that you?
This video explains it.
I seem to recall reading somewhere they have sedatives and stuff because people have a real potential to freak out and try to walk out of air locks.
I’ll see if I can find the article.
Edit: I didn’t reread it… but I had this one book marked
Wow. Good find. It looks like they were concerned about a potentially suicidal person opening the hatch. So much so that they actually installed a padlock on it in future flights.
That’s right, I remember that now. A failed experiment or something made the astronaut suicidal…not the one I was thinking of, let me see if I can find the other one lol
0 gravity and living in an enclosed space take a huge toll on one physical and mental being, obviously they wanna go home today, but i bet they also wanna go home in one piece
I think they’d prefer going home. The mission they came up for is long done, they may have important events in their life or their family’s lives scheduled for after the planned return, and staying up for months increases the chances of long term damage to their bodies.
I imagine they’re pretty bored by now.
I keep saying the same thing and get a bunch of people replying things like, “how do you know they want to see their kids?”
To be fair, I’ve met some absent parents that genuinely don’t care if they see their kids again, and unfortnately it is possible for someone like that to be capable of being an astronaut.
Sure, but I think that’s a different argument from “they won’t take seeing their kids again over months in space when it was supposed to be an eight-day mission because they’re in space.”
Yeah there’s a thanksgiving and a Christmas coming up that they’ll miss.
You would think that, but that’s probably not the case. This is what they train for, this is what they want to do. As a rule, astronauts don’t tend to get bored of space, that’s why they’re astronauts.
They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there
I think I read somewhere, but I’d have to go track it down, that the ISS was catching up on a whole lot of back-logged experiments with their unexpected addition to the team.