The Starliner is programmed to uncouple Liftoff from the International Space Station and return to Earth will occur at 6:04 p.m. Eastern Time on Sept. 6 at the earliest. If the weather cooperates and the spacecraft leaves the ISS as planned, it will land at White Sands Spaceport in New Mexico with the help of parachutes to slow its descent and inflated airbags around 12:03 a.m. Eastern Time on Sept. 7. While ground crews at the Starliner Mission Control Center in Houston and the Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida can control the spacecraft remotely if necessary, it will be a completely autonomous, uncrewed flight for Starliner.
NASA recently announced that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the astronauts who headed to the ISS aboard the Starliner for its first crewed flight, will be returning home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Wilmore and Williams flew to the ISS in June and were only supposed to spend a little over a week in the orbiting laboratory. However, along the way, five of the spacecraft’s maneuvering thrusters had failed, and the helium leak issue that previously caused its launch to be delayed had worsened. Engineers on the ground ran tests with the help of the astronauts on the ISS to determine if the Starliner was safe for the crew to return to Earth on. Ultimately, NASA decided it was safer for Wilmore and Williams to return home on a SpaceX vehicle, because “there was too much uncertainty” surrounding the Starliner’s thrusters.
The space agency Covering Starliner's return live As for the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which will replace Boeing’s vehicle on the ISS, it is scheduled to launch no earlier than September 24. Instead of flying with four astronauts as planned, it will fly with two (NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov) to leave two empty seats for its return flight with Wilmore and Williams in February 2025.
