Boeing

Bloomberg reports that local airlines have been told to refuse further deliveries of Boeing jets, in another blow for a beleaguered aerospace company that’s suffered from quality crises and layoffs.

Right on schedule, the Dragon capsule deployed its parachutes and landed off the coast of Florida as recovery crews began the process of bringing the capsule onboard a recovery ship and extracting its crew.

The Dragon spacecraft is fewer than 20 minutes out from splashdown in Florida. As noted on NASA’s livestream, it has completed the deorbit burn that lasted about seven and a half minutes at 5:18PM ET, and is entering a period of communications blackout as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere.

Last night, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, along with Crew-9 members Aleksandr Gorbunov and Nick Hague, left the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft now that the Crew-10 mission has arrived to relieve them. NASA will resume coverage of their return mission this afternoon, as they are expected to splash down off the coast of Florida at about 5:57PM ET, ending a voyage that started last June.

Now that SpaceX ground teams have “successfully flushed a suspected pocket of trapped air” in the ground support hydraulics system used for the clamp arm supporting the Falcon 9 rocket, there will be another attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission to the ISS tonight, after the first one on Wednesday was scrubbed.

After separating from the ISS a few hours ago, Starliner is making its uncrewed landing, which is scheduled to touch down in New Mexico just after midnight ET.

The troubled spacecraft successfully undocked from the ISS without issue just after 6PM ET, and now it is scheduled to land at 12:01AM ET on Saturday at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

Boeing’s first crewed Starliner launch got Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station in June, but with issues including helium leaks, will the same vehicle still bring them home?

Will astronauts Barry ”Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams come home from the ISS on the Starliner, or will they wait to hitch a ride home from SpaceX next year without protective space suits?

In the meantime, NASA officials said on a media call that they will weigh the risks of bringing Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.

Days before Boeing’s deferred prosecution agreement over 737 Max crashes would’ve expired, a door plug blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight, and the case was reopened. Now, attorneys for family members of the crash victims have been told federal prosecutors will seek a guilty plea from Boeing to resolve a criminal fraud charge, which one lawyer called “another sweetheart deal.”

NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:

SpaceX isn’t the only one busy today, as the finally-launched Starliner is closing in on the International Space Station. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have already performed “about two hours of free-flight demonstrations,” and more are planned, despite additional helium leaks detected by flight controllers overnight.

NASA, Boeing, and the United Launch Alliance had hoped for a shorter delay, but NASA says the ULA is taking more time to troubleshoot an issue with ground launch systems that halted the mission less than four minutes from liftoff.

With just 3 minutes and 50 seconds to go, one of three redundant ground computers involved in the launch was slow to respond, triggering a hold and the call to abort liftoff, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said during a press conference today.

The mission will launch “hopefully the first of May,” according to Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, who was joined by fellow astronaut Suni Williams during a NASA press conference yesterday.

The US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation will consider whether Boeing complied with its 2021 settlement with the DOJ in light of an Alaska Boeing 737 Max that recently lost a chunk of fuselage mid-flight, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Sure, the checked bag fees play a role in the lack of overhead bin space but they aren’t the whole story! The rise in hardsided cases that can’t squish, as well as too-large or oddly-shaped luggage, contribute to the problem. So does traveler impatience.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s report describes the defect that prompted immediate aircraft groundings as the FAA scrambled to investigate a nightmarish January 5th Alaska Airlines flight.

So said Cornell Beard, the president of a union chapter representing Wichita factory workers for Spirit AeroSystems, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement about the emergency airworthiness directive it sent to airlines today following what the directive termed a ‘rapid decompression’ of an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday.

The New York Times writes that Flight 1282 made an emergency landing at Portland International Airport 20 because a wall blew out. Thankfully, all 171 passengers survived.