Boeing Starliner astronauts finally head home, nine months later

Eight days. That’s how long Boeing Starliner’s mission — its first flight test with crew aboard — was supposed to last. But this mission has been singular in almost every way, and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have instead spent the past nine and a half months aboard the International Space Station. Now, finally, they're headed home. Their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule is slated to begin undocking from the ISS at 1:05 am ET Tuesday and is scheduled for splashdown at 5:57 pm ET, according to NASA's timetable. (Portions of the mission will stream live on the agency's website.) The Starliner crew was never truly stranded, to be clear. They always had a way off the space station in an emergency. But if this mission's foibles taught us one thing, it was to expect the unexpected. Even now, six months after the troubled spacecraft autonomously undocked from the ISS and landed at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, leaving its crew behind and effectively ending the flight test ... Read full article.