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Boeing will fly its empty capsule back to Earth soon. Two NASA astronauts will stay behind

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Boeing will fly its empty capsule back to Earth soon. Two NASA astronauts will stay behind
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Boeing will fly its empty capsule back to Earth soon. Two NASA astronauts will stay behind

2024-09-05 01:32 Last Updated At:01:40

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.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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)

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)

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The Berlin Wall: A divide that once shaped German women's lives still echoes today

2024-11-08 15:39 Last Updated At:15:40

BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.

Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.

Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany during its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.

As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.

“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.

Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.

Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.

Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.

“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”

By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.

In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.

That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.

Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.

Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.

“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”

More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.

Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.

“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench near a thin, cobble-stoned path in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.

She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.

“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.

Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74% of women are working, compared to 71.5% in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.

Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.

In 2018, 57% of children under the age of 3 were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27% in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44% in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.

Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.

Only 31.4% lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41% in Belgium's parliament, 43.6% in Denmark, 45% in Norway and 45.6% in Sweden.

Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities.

“I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.

Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen.

Seamstresses work th the VEB clothing factory "Fortschritt",1987 in Berlin. (Zentralbild/DPA via AP)

Seamstresses work th the VEB clothing factory "Fortschritt",1987 in Berlin. (Zentralbild/DPA via AP)

Women work in the former East German Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) an 'Agricultural Production Cooperative' in Golzow on April 13, 1981. (Heinrich Sanden/DPA via AP)

Women work in the former East German Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) an 'Agricultural Production Cooperative' in Golzow on April 13, 1981. (Heinrich Sanden/DPA via AP)

Mealtime at the kindergarten on Wieckerstrasse in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen, in November 1987. (Zentralbid/DPA via AP)

Mealtime at the kindergarten on Wieckerstrasse in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen, in November 1987. (Zentralbid/DPA via AP)

Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women works on the photos in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women works on the photos in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women attends an interview with the Associated Press in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women attends an interview with the Associated Press in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm shows an old photo of herself from her youth during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm shows an old photo of herself from her youth during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm attends an interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm attends an interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm feeds her horse after the interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm feeds her horse after the interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm looks at her old photos album during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm looks at her old photos album during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Claudia Huth walks in front of her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth walks in front of her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth shows old photos of her children and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth shows old photos of her children and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

A repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

A repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth shows an old photo of her family and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth shows an old photo of her family and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

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