beautiful streak across the sky as she returns to White Sans New Mexico descent in the desert 6 hours after the Starliner capsule left the International Space Station touchdown Starliner is back on Earth but touchdown was bittersweet Boeing's first astronaut Mission Landing without its astronauts on board and liftoff of Starliner in Atlas 5 the Starliner took off in June transporting Butch will Moore and sunny Williams to the ISS for what should have been an 8-day Mission but Thruster failures and helium leaks plagued the trip NASA finally deciding it wasn't safe enough to send the pair back home in the craft instead they're booked on a return trip with SpaceX eight months later in February you know it was a bullseye Landing I think we made the right decision to not have Butch and sunny on board all of us feel uh Happy about the successful Landing but then there's a piece of us all of us that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it we had planned to have the mission land with Butch and sunny on board after retiring its own space shuttles over a decade ago NASA hired us companies Boeing and SpaceX to provide the flights Elon musk's companies completed nine crude flights into space but Boeing hit problem after problem causing delays and a billion dooll repair bill Boeing's have a number of issues at the moment I mean yes it was a test flight and this is the kind of thing that happens but Boeing as a company have had problems for a number of years now and and looking at the technical press and even the financial press one of the problems seems to be the emphasis on financial management rather than technical management as Butch and sunny adapt to their unexpected extension on the ISS Boeing must now work out what went wrong NASA saying it's too early to know when the next Starliner fly with crew on board will be ready to launch Rachel venables Sky News