Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.

Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.

It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks. For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.

Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.

Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

“She’s on her way home,” Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420 kilometers) over China and disappeared into the black void.

Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. “A good landing, pretty awesome,” said Boeing’s Mission Control.

Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

There were some snags during reentry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich said at a news conference early Saturday. “All of us feel 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.”

Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.

Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion.

SpaceX’s crew ferry flight later this month will be its 10th for NASA since 2020. The Dragon capsule will launch on the half-year expedition with only two astronauts since two seats are reserved for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They’ve kept busy in space, helping with repairs and experiments. The two are now full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board.

Even before the pair launched on June 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Starliner’s propulsion system was leaking helium. The leak was small and thought to be isolated, but four more cropped up after liftoff. Then five thrusters failed. Although four of the thrusters were recovered, it gave NASA pause as to whether more malfunctions might hamper the capsule’s descent from orbit.

Boeing conducted numerous thruster tests in space and on the ground over the summer, and was convinced its spacecraft could safely bring the astronauts back. But NASA could not get comfortable with the thruster situation and went with SpaceX.

Flight controllers conducted more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking; one failed to ignite. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Starliner will be transported in a couple weeks back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the analyses will unfold.

NASA officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing U.S. companies transporting astronauts. The goal is for SpaceX and Boeing to take turns launching crews — one a year per company — until the space station is abandoned in 2030 right before its fiery reentry. That doesn’t give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to NASA.

Stich said post-landing it’s too early to know when the next Starliner flight with astronauts might occur.

“It will take a little time to determine the path forward,” he said.

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Rather than flying Boeing’s Starliner back to Earth, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams would catch a ride on SpaceX’s next flight. That option would keep them at the space station until next February.

The test pilots anticipated being away just a week or so when they rocketed away as Starliner’s first crew. But thruster failures and helium leaks marred the capsule’s trip to the space station, raising doubts about its ability to return safely and leaving the astronauts in limbo.

NASA officials said they’re analyzing more data before making a decision by end of next week or beginning of the next. These thrusters are crucial for holding the capsule in the right position when it comes time to descend from orbit.

“We’ve got time available before we bring Starliner home and we want to use that time wisely,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

Switching to SpaceX would require bumping two of the four astronauts assigned to the next ferry flight, currently targeted for late September. Wilmore and Williams would take the empty seats in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule once that half-year mission ends.

Another complication: The space station has just two parking places for U.S. capsules. Boeing’s capsule would have to depart ahead of the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon in order to free up a spot.

NASA would like to keep SpaceX’s current crew up there until the replacements arrive, barring an emergency. Those four should have returned to Earth this month, but saw a seventh month added to their mission because of the uncertainty over Starliner, keeping them up there until the end of September. Most space station stays last six months, although some have gone a full year.

Eager to have competing services and backup options, NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing to transport astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011.

SpaceX’s first astronaut flight was in 2020. Boeing suffered so much trouble on its initial test flight without a crew in 2019 that a do-over was ordered. Then more problems cropped up, costing the company more than $1 billion to fix before finally flying astronauts.

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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.

The findings released Monday are based on seismic measurements from NASA’s Mars InSight lander, which detected more than 1,300 marsquakes before shutting down two years ago.

This water — believed to be seven miles to 12 miles (11.5 kilometers to 20 kilometers) down in the Martian crust — most likely would have seeped from the surface billions of years ago when Mars harbored rivers, lakes and possibly oceans, according to the lead scientist, Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Just because water still may be sloshing around inside Mars does not mean it holds life, Wright said.

“Instead, our findings mean that there are environments that could possibly be habitable,” he said in an email.

His team combined computer models with InSight readings including the quakes’ velocity in determining underground water was the most likely explanation. The results appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If InSight’s location at Elysium Planitia near Mars’ equator is representative of the rest of the red planet, the underground water would be enough to fill a global ocean a mile or so (1 kilometer to 2 kilometers) deep, Wright said.

It would take drills and other equipment to confirm the presence of water and seek out any potential signs of microbial life.

Although the InSight lander is no longer working, scientists continue to analyze the data collected from 2018 through 2022, in search of more information about Mars’ interior.

Wet almost all over more than 3 billion years ago, Mars is thought to have lost its surface water as its atmosphere thinned, turning the planet into the dry, dusty world known today. Scientists theorize much of this ancient water escaped out into space or remained buried below.

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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.

The planet is roughly the same diameter as Jupiter, but with six times the mass. Its atmosphere is also rich in hydrogen like Jupiter’s.

One big difference: It takes this planet more than a century, possibly as long as 250 years, to go around its star. It’s 15 times the distance from its star than Earth is to the sun.

Scientists had long suspected a big planet circled this star 12 light-years away, but not this massive or far from its star. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. These new observations show the planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A, part of a three-star system.

An international team led by Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s Elisabeth Matthews in Germany collected the images last year and published the findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Astronomers directly observed the incredibly old and cold gas giant — a rare and tricky feat — by masking the star through use of a special shading device on Webb. By blocking the starlight, the planet stood out as a pinpoint of infrared light.

The planet and star clock in at 3.5 billion years old, 1 billion years younger than our own solar system, but still considered old and brighter than expected, according to Matthews.

The star is so close and bright to our own solar system that it’s visible with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.

Don’t bet on life, though.

“This is a gas giant with no hard surface or liquid water oceans,” Matthews said in an email.

It’s unlikely this solar system sports more gas giants, she said, but small rocky worlds could be lurking there.

Worlds similar to Jupiter can help scientists understand “how these planets evolve over giga-year timescales,” she said.

The first planets outside our solar system — dubbed exoplanets — were confirmed in the early 1990s. NASA’s tally now stands at 5,690 as of mid-July. The vast majority were detected via the transit method, in which a fleeting dip in starlight, repeated at regular intervals, indicates an orbiting planet.

Telescopes in space and also on the ground are on the hunt for even more, especially planets that might be similar to Earth.

Launched in 2021, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb telescope is the biggest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever placed in space.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Scientists have confirmed a cave on the moon, not far from where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed 55 years ago, and suspect there are hundreds more that could house future astronauts.

An Italian-led team reported Monday that there’s evidence for a sizable cave accessible from the deepest known pit on the moon. It’s located at the Sea of Tranquility, just 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Apollo 11’s landing site.

The pit, like the more than 200 others discovered up there, was created by the collapse of a lava tube.

Researchers analyzed radar measurements by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and compared the results with lava tubes on Earth. Their findings appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The radar data reveals only the initial part of the underground cavity, according to the scientists. They estimate it’s at least 130 feet (40 meters) wide and tens of yards (meters) long, probably more.

“Lunar caves have remained a mystery for over 50 years. So it was exciting to be able to finally prove the existence” of one, Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone of the University of Trento, wrote in an email.

Most of the pits seem to be located in the moon’s ancient lava plains, according to the scientists. There also could be some at the moon’s south pole, the planned location of NASA’s astronaut landings later this decade. Permanently shadowed craters there are believed to hold frozen water that could provide drinking water and rocket fuel.

During NASA’s Apollo program, 12 astronauts landed on the moon, beginning with Armstrong and Aldrin on July 20, 1969.

The findings suggest there could be hundreds of pits on the moon and thousands of lava tubes. Such places could serve as a natural shelter for astronauts, protecting them from cosmic rays and solar radiation as well as from micrometeorite strikes. Building habitats from scratch would be more time-consuming and challenging, even when factoring in the potential need of reinforcing the cave walls to prevent a collapse, the team said.

Rocks and other material inside these caves — unaltered by the harsh surface conditions over the eons — also can help scientists better understand how the moon evolved, especially involving its volcanic activity

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The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from California on Thursday night, carrying 20 Starlink satellites. Several minutes into the flight, the upper stage engine malfunctioned. SpaceX on Friday blamed a liquid oxygen leak.

The company said flight controllers managed to make contact with half of the satellites and attempted to boost them to a higher orbit using onboard ion thrusters. But with the low end of their orbit only 84 miles (135 kilometers) above Earth — less than half what was intended — “our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites,” the company said via X.

SpaceX said the satellites will reenter the atmosphere and burn up. There was no mention of when they might come down. More than 6,000 orbiting Starlinks currently provide internet service to customers in some of the most remote corners of the world.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem must be fixed before Falcon rockets can fly again.

It was not known if or how the accident might impact SpaceX’s upcoming crew flights. A billionaire’s spaceflight is scheduled for July 31 from Florida with plans for the first private spacewalk, followed in mid-August by an astronaut flight to the International Space Station for NASA.

The tech entrepreneur who will lead the private flight, Jared Isaacman, said Friday that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has “an incredible track record” and as well as an emergency escape system.

The last launch failure occurred in 2015 during a space station cargo run. Another rocket exploded the following year during testing on the ground.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk said the high flight rate will make it easier to identify and correct the problem.

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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.

The observatory operated by NASA and the European Space Agency photographed the two galaxies 326 million light-years away, surrounded by a blue haze of stars and gas. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

The pictures, released Friday, marks the second anniversary of Webb’s science operations.

The neighboring galaxies, nicknamed Penguin and the Egg, have been tangled up for tens of millions of years, according to NASA. They’ll eventually merge into a single galaxy. The same interaction will happen to our own Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy in 4 billion years, the space agency said.

Considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the biggest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched. It rocketed away in 2021 and underwent six months of commissioning, before its first official images were released in July 2022.

It’s positioned 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth.

“In just two years, Webb has transformed our view of the universe,” NASA’s Mark Clampin said in a statement.

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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.

NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched aboard Boeing’s new Starliner capsule early last month, the first people to ride it. Helium leaks and thruster failures almost derailed their arrival at the International Space Station, and have kept them there much longer than planned. Now the earliest they could return may be the end of July, officials said.

In their first news conference from orbit, the pair said they expect to return once thruster testing is complete here on Earth. They said they’re not complaining about getting extra time in orbit, and are enjoying helping the station crew. Both have previously spent stints at the orbiting lab, which is also home to seven others.

“I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home, no problem,” Williams told reporters.

The test flight should have lasted eight days, ending on June 14.

NASA’s commercial crew program director Steve Stich said the earliest the Starliner astronauts might return is the end of July. The goal is to get them back before SpaceX delivers a fresh crew in mid-August, but that, too, could change, he noted.

This week, NASA and Boeing are trying to duplicate the Starliner’s thruster problems on a brand new unit at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, one of the prime landing sites in the U.S. western desert. The trouble is in the propulsion system, used to maneuver the spacecraft.

Five thrusters failed as the capsule approached the space station on June 6, a day after liftoff. Four have since been reactivated. Wilmore said there should be enough working thrusters to get him and Williams out of orbit. There are also bigger engines that could fill in, if necessary.

“That mantra you’ve heard, failure is not an option, that’s why we are staying here now,” Wilmore said. “We trust that the tests that we’re doing are the ones we need to do to get the right answers, to give us the data that we need to come back.”

Boeing and NASA consider the ground tests essential to determine what might have gone wrong since that part of the capsule — the service module — is discarded before landing. The leaks also are located in this disposable section.

So far, testing has not replicated the hot temperatures reached during the flight, according to Stich. Managers want to make sure the suspect thrusters are not damaged, before bringing Starliner back. They were fired more frequently than anticipated early in the flight, and the extra demand on them may have caused them to fail, Stich noted.

At the same time, ground tests are being conducted to better understand the helium leaks, which could stem from bad seals. Officials have previously said there is ample helium left for the trip home.

Hurricane Beryl slowed some of the work. Johnson Space Center in Houston, home to the control centers for both NASA and Boeing, was closed earlier this week to all but the most critical staff.

Boeing’s Mark Nappi stressed that in an emergency, Starliner and its crew could return right now. While the company does not believe the thrusters are damaged, “we want to fill in the blanks and run this test to assure ourselves of that.”

NASA ordered up the Starliner and SpaceX Dragon capsules a decade ago for astronaut flights to and from the space station, paying each company billions of dollars. SpaceX’s first taxi flight with astronauts was in 2020. Boeing’s first crew flight was repeatedly delayed because of software and other issues.

There have been no discussions with SpaceX about sending up a rescue capsule, Stich said.

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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.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Boeing launched astronauts for the first time Wednesday, belatedly joining SpaceX as a second taxi service for NASA.

A pair of NASA test pilots blasted off aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule for the International Space Station, the first to fly the new spacecraft.

The trip by Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams was expected to take 25 hours, with an arrival Thursday. They will spend just over a week at the orbiting lab before climbing back into Starliner for a remote desert touchdown in the western U.S. on June 14.

“Let’s get going!” Wilmore called out a few minutes before liftoff.

Half an hour later, he and Williams were safely in orbit and giving chase to the space station. Back at Cape Canaveral, the relieved launch controllers stood and applauded. After all the trouble leading up to Wednesday’s launch, including two scrapped countdowns, everything seemed to go smoothly before and during liftoff.

Years late because of spacecraft flaws, Starliner’s crew debut comes as the company struggles with unrelated safety issues on its airplane side.

Wilmore and Williams — retired Navy captains and former space station residents — stressed repeatedly before the launch that they had full confidence in Boeing’s ability to get it right with this test flight. Crippled by bad software, Starliner’s initial test flight in 2019 without a crew had to be repeated before NASA would let its astronauts strap in. The 2022 do-over went much better, but parachute problems later cropped up and flammable tape had to be removed from the capsule.

Wednesday’s launch was the third attempt with astronauts since early May, coming after a pair of rocket-related problems, most recently last weekend. A small helium leak in the spacecraft’s propulsion system also caused delays, but managers decided the leak was manageable and not a safety issue.

“I know it’s been a long road to get here,” NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said before the weekend delay.

Boeing was hired alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX a decade ago to ferry NASA’s astronauts to and from the space station. The space agency wanted two competing U.S. companies for the job in the wake of the space shuttles’ retirement, paying $4.2 billion to Boeing and just over half that to SpaceX, which refashioned the capsule it was using to deliver station supplies.

SpaceX launched astronauts into orbit in 2020, becoming the first private business to achieve what only three countries — Russia, the U.S. and China — had mastered. It has taken nine crews to the space station for NASA and three private groups for a Houston company that charters flights.

The liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was the 100th of an Atlas V for rocket maker United Launch Alliance. It was the first ride for astronauts on an Atlas rocket since John Glenn’s Mercury era more than 60 years ago; the rocket usually launches satellites and other spacecraft.

Despite the Atlas V’s perfect record, the human presence cranked up the tension for the scores of NASA and Boeing employees gathered at Cape Canaveral and Mission Control in Houston.

Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon are designed to be fully autonomous and reusable. Wilmore and Williams occasionally will take manual control of Starliner on their way to the space station, to check out its systems.

If the mission goes well, NASA will alternate between SpaceX and Boeing for taxi flights, beginning next year. The backup pilot for this test flight, Mike Fincke, will strap in for Starliner’s next trip.

“This is exciting. We built up to this moment for years and years, and it finally happened,” Fincke said from neighboring Kennedy Space Center. “I feel like the whole planet was cheering for them.”

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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.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Last-minute computer trouble nixed Saturday’s launch attempt for Boeing’s first astronaut flight, the latest in a string of delays over the years.

Two NASA astronauts were strapped in the company’s Starliner capsule when the countdown automatically was halted at 3 minutes and 50 seconds by the computer system that controls the final minutes before liftoff.

With only a split second to take off, there was no time to work the latest problem and the launch was called off.

Technicians raced to the pad to help astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams out of the capsule atop the fully fueled Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Within an hour of the launch abort, the hatch was reopened.

The team can’t get to the computers to troubleshoot the problem until the rocket is drained of all its fuel, said Tory Bruno, CEO for the rocket maker, United Launch Alliance.

Bruno said one of the three redundant computers located near the rocket at the pad was sluggish. All three must work properly to proceed with a launch, he said.

Depending on what needs to be fixed, the next launch attempt could be as early as Wednesday. If it doesn’t blast off this coming week, then that would be it until mid-June in order to move the rocket off the pad and replace batteries.

“This is the business that we’re in,” Boeing’s Mark Nappi said. “Everything’s got to work perfectly.”

It was the second launch attempt. The first try on May 6 was delayed for leak checks and rocket repairs.

NASA wants a backup to SpaceX, which has been flying astronauts since 2020.

Boeing should have launched its first crew around the same time as SpaceX, but its first test flight with no one on board in 2019 was plagued by severe software issues and never made it to the space station.

A redo in 2022 fared better, but parachute problems and flammable later caused more delays. A small helium leak in the capsule’s propulsion system last month came on top of a rocket valve issue.

More valve trouble cropped up two hours before Saturday’s planned liftoff, but the team used a backup circuit to get the ground-equipment valves working to top off the fuel for the rocket’s upper stage. Launch controllers were relieved to keep pushing ahead, but the computer system known as the ground launch sequencer ended the effort.

“Of course, this is emotionally disappointing,” NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, the backup pilot, said from neighboring Kennedy Space Center shortly after the countdown was halted.

But he said delays are part of spaceflight. “We’re going to have a great launch in our future.”

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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.