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Wilmore gave a near minute-by-minute retelling of what went through his mind when four thrusters on the Boeing-made spacecraft failed while he and Williams were attempting to dock at the International Space Station. The near-catastrophic crisis caused Wilmore to lose full control of the plagued capsule, leaving the seasoned astronauts floating in the vast void of space until NASA’s mission control came to their rescue. “I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore, 62, recalled in an interview with Ars Technica. Wilmore explained that flight regulations typically call for malfunctioned ships to abort docking...

Starliner has finally come home, more than three months after it launched on a planned 10-day mission.. Starliner's long space odyssey is over. The Boeing capsule, named Calypso, returned to Earth early this morning (Sept. 7), touching down in the New Mexico desert at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT; 11:01 p.m. local time on Sept. 6). "Great landing of Calyspo!" NASA astronaut Suni Williams said on the agency's webcast. "I don't think that could have gone better." The landing was long-delayed, coming more than three months into an orbital mission originally expected to last about 10 days. And, while Starliner...

Voyager 1 hadn't used its four "trajectory correction maneuver" (TCM) thrusters since November 1980, during the spacecraft's last planetary flyby — an epic encounter with Saturn. But mission team members fired them up again Tuesday (Nov. 28)... The little engines passed the test with flying colors, NASA officials said. "The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test," Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton...

"The gas jets coming out of the comet - they are acting like thrusters and are slowing down the comet," said flight director Andrea Accomazzo. The European Space Agency official was speaking this week at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. He was describing how his team has learnt to fly Rosetta around the 10-billion-tonne, 4km-wide body with remarkable precision. Navigators use a system of landmarks on the comet to understand how it is rotating and moving through space. This information is fed into a model that helps plan a trajectory for the satellite. And it was while running this...