CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Boeing will attempt to return its problem-plagued capsule from the International Space Station later this week — with empty seats.
NASA said Wednesday that everything is on track for the Starliner capsule to undock from the space station Friday evening. The fully automated capsule will aim for a touchdown in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range six hours later.
NASA's two stuck astronauts who flew up on Starliner will remain behind at the orbiting lab. They'll ride home with SpaceX in February, eight months after launching on what should have been a weeklong test flight. Thruster trouble and helium leaks kept delaying their return until NASA decided that it was too risky for them to accompany Starliner back as originally planned.
“It’s been a journey to get here and we’re excited to have Starliner return," said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.
NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will close the hatches between Starliner and the space station on Thursday. They are now considered full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board, helping with experiments and maintenance, and ramping up their exercise to keep their bones and muscles strong during their prolonged exposure to weightlessness.
To make room for them on SpaceX’s next taxi flight, the Dragon capsule will launch with two astronauts instead of the usual four. Two were cut late last week from the six-month expedition, which is due to blast off in late September. Boeing has to free up the parking place for SpaceX’s arrival.
Boeing encountered serious flaws with Starliner long before its June 5 liftoff on the long-delayed astronaut demo.
Starliner’s first test flight went so poorly in 2019 — the capsule never reached the space station because of software errors — that the mission was repeated three years later. More problems surfaced, resulting in even more delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
The capsule had suffered multiple thruster failures and propulsion-system helium leaks by the time it pulled up at the space station after launch. Boeing conducted extensive thruster tests in space and on the ground, and contended the capsule could safely bring the astronauts back. But NASA disagreed, setting the complex ride swap in motion.
Starliner will make a faster, simpler getaway than planned, using springs to push away from the space station and then short thruster firings to gradually increase the distance. The original plan called for an hour of dallying near the station, mostly for picture-taking; that was cut to 20 or so minutes to reduce the stress on the capsule's thrusters and keep the station safe.
Additional test firings of Starliner's 28 thrusters are planned before the all-important descent from orbit. Engineers want to learn as much as they can since the thrusters won't return to Earth; the section containing them will be ditched before the capsule reenters.
The stuck astronauts — retired Navy captains — have lived on the space station before and settled in just fine, according to NASA officials. Even though their mission focus has changed, “they’re just as dedicated for the success of human spaceflight going forward," flight director Anthony Vareha said.
Their blue Boeing spacesuits will return with the capsule, along with some old station equipment.
NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX a decade ago to ferry its astronauts to and from the space station after its shuttles retired. SpaceX accomplished the feat in 2020 and has since launched nine crews for NASA and four for private customers.
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In this long-exposure photo provided by NASA, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is docked to the Harmony module of the International Space Station on July 3, 2024. (NASA via AP)
AITO, Lebanon (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in northern Lebanon that killed at least 22 people needs to be independently investigated, the United Nations’ human rights office said Tuesday.
“We have real concerns with respect to … the laws of war,” Jeremy Laurence, a spokesperson for the U.N.'s human rights office in Geneva said a day after the strike, as rescue workers searching through the rubble found more bodies and remains. Laurence said the U.N. had received credible reports that a dozen women and children were among the dead.
The Israeli military said it “struck a target belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization" and that it would look into reports of civilian deaths.
The apartment building hit in the airstrike was in the small village of Aito, in the country’s Christian heartland and far from Hezbollah’s main areas of influence in Lebanon's south and east. The strike was a shock to residents, and it exacerbated fears that Israel would expand its offensive deeper into Lebanon.
“I heard a loud noise, like a boom,” said Dany Alwan, who lives next door. “We ran outside, I saw the dust and the smoke and the rubble. There was a body here, another one there. It was a really ugly and painful scene.”
The three-story building had been rented out to the Hijazi family, which fled their home in the southern village of Aitaroun, according to Elie Alwan, Dany Alwan's brother and the building's owner. Some 1.2 million people have fled southern and eastern Lebanon, where the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has been concentrated.
As rescue workers rummaged through the debris on Tuesday, they found the body of a child, and later a small leg and other remains that they put together in a white bag. The Lebanese military watched as a bulldozer cleared heaps of twisted steel, destroyed olive trees, and crushed rocks.
Over the past year, 2,350 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, according to the country's Health Ministry, which says roughly 25 percent have been women and children.
Earlier on Tuesday, the acting leader of Hezbollah said the militant group would fire rockets into more areas of Israel until it ceases its airstrikes and ends its ground invasion of Lebanon.
Naim Kassem said Hezbollah is focused on “hurting the enemy,” comments made in a pre-recorded televised speech delivered on the same day the United States said it sent a small team of troops to Israel to support an American-made missile-defense system.
Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the past year in support of Hamas' war with Israel in Gaza. Tens of thousands of northern Israelis have been displaced from their homes by those attacks — and Israel has said its war with Hezbollah is aimed at stopping those rockets so families can return home.
On Tuesday, Kassem signaled that Hezbollah would ramp up attacks further south in Israel, which it has already done by targeting Tel Aviv and Haifa. Kassem has headed the militant group since Sept. 27, when its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike.
Hezbollah began targeting Israel with rockets on Oct. 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead and 250 as hostages in Gaza.
Israel's ensuing war against Hamas has left more than 42,000 people dead in Gaza, according to local health officials. They do not differentiate between fighters and civilians, but have said a little more than half the dead are women and children. Hezbollah has insisted it will continue to target Israel until a cease-fire in Gaza is reached.
“We cannot separate Lebanon from Palestine, or Palestine from the world,” Kassem said.
Also on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder announced the arrival of U.S. troops in Israel on Monday. The team will operate a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery there to defend against ballistic missile attacks from Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas, and has launched two missile attacks on Israel.
“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Ryder said.
Iran has warned U.S. troops would be in harm’s way if they launch another attack.
In Lebanon, Israel's bombardment and ground invasion have displaced more than 400,000 children in the past three weeks, according to Ted Chaiban, deputy executive director at UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency.
Search continues among the rubble of a destroyed building at the site of Monday's Israeli airstrike in Aito village, north Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Lebanese Red Cross volunteers and Civil Defence worker remove the remains of killed people from the rubble of a destroyed building at the site of Monday's Israeli airstrike in Aito village, north Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
