New Mexico
Uncrewed Boeing Starliner lands safely in New Mexico
Sept. 6 (UPI) — The uncrewed Boeing Starliner successfully landed in New Mexico late Friday after departing six hours earlier from the International Space Station.
The capsule left behind two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who must now remain in the station until February for a return home on a SpaceX capsule. NASA decided problems with Starliner’s thrusters and leaking helium made it too risky of a return with humans.
Starliner landed at White Sands Space Harbor at 10:01 p.m. MDT. Ground crews welcomed the capsule with plans to return it to Florida where it launched on June 6.
The autonomous undocking from the ISS was carried out as scheduled at 4:04 p.m. MDT after the craft was unhooked from the the forward module of the station. It slowly backed away while executing a series of 12 “breakout burns” over a 5-minute span, driving it farther away from the station while flying over central China.
The Starliner oriented itself as it plunged into the Earth’s atmosphere while still traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour. The atmosphere was more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Three parachutes and thrusters slowed the craft and airbags were deployed.
Boeing is hoping to earn certification for future flights for NASA. NASA wants to rely on another company than Space-X and Russia’s Soyuz for Space Station missions.
Starliner is the first U.S-made capsule to land on the ground instead of splashing down in the ocean.
“It’s important to remember this was a test mission,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for space operations, said at a news conference after Starliner had landed.
“I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, reentry and landing,” Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, said. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”
NASA determined that the capsule’s propulsion system appeared stable, but the thruster issues posed too much of a risk for Starliner to return with a crew.
“If we’d had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say we could have had a crewed flight – but we didn’t have that,” Stitch said.
“From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing,” he said. “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 Suni on board.”
Its flight path went over parts of northern Mexico and southwestern New Mexico, making it visible in the night sky over those areas depending on cloud cover.
On June 5, the Boeing spacecraft took off on its first crewed flight, transporting NASA Wilmore and Williams to the space station. However, as it approached the orbiting laboratory, NASA and Boeing identified helium leaks and noted malfunctions with its reaction control thrusters.
Five of Starliner’s 28 “reaction control system” thrusters abruptly stopped working en route to the space station. Four were recovered and at least one stayed out of service for the entire mission.
NASA announced last month that out of concerns for the safety of Wilmore and Williams, they will remain aboard the ISS until February while Starliner is autonomously returned to Earth without a crew.
Wilmore and Williams are now scheduled to return home aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission.
“It is time to bring Calypso home,” Williams said to mission control Friday evening. “You have got this. We have your backs, and you’ve got this. Bring her back to Earth.”
Its service module up during re-entry over the southern Pacific Ocean, while its heat shield was jettisoned at approximately 30,000 feet, exposing a series of drags and parachutes.
Instead, the thruster issues became the latest major setback for Boeing’s Starliner program, which even before the launch was more than $1.5 billion over budget and years behind schedule. An uncrewed test flight to the space station, which NASA required of Boeing before its spacecraft could carry astronauts, also went awry the first time, and the company had to repeat it in 2022.
Boeing’s empty Starliner capsule landed in the New Mexico desert late Friday night, with its two test pilots left behind at the International Space Station. The pair were supposed to be away for just eight days, but thruster trouble and helium leaks marred their trip to the space station back in June. NASA judged their return too risky.
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A school bus leaves Desert Hills Elementary in Las Cruces Wednesday, July 31, 2024 to start dropping children off at home. (Photo by Leah Romero / Source New Mexico)
The rate of chronic absenteeism in New Mexico schools dropped in the last school year, but the state continues to report some of the highest rates in the country since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Missing at least 10% of school days in an academic year, or 18 days in a 180-day school year, is how state and national experts define chronic absenteeism. Since 2020, New Mexico has been one of the states with the highest rates in the country, with only Washington D.C. and Alaska reporting higher rates.
“Chronic absenteeism has a direct correlation to graduation: Students who are chronically absent in pre-K through 1st grade have a harder time reading at grade level by 3rd grade, which results in lower achievement scores in middle school. In high school, these students are more likely to drop out. Simply put, you cannot learn if you’re not in school,” said Kelly Jameson, spokesperson for Las Cruces Public Schools.
Jameson said the LCPS Board of Education adopted Policy JHB in 2020 to ensure the district complies with the state’s Attendance for Success Act, an effort to address the high number of students missing school. The policy established an “early warning system” allowing the district to identify absent students early to prevent and intervene in individual cases before a student became chronically absent.
“In LCPS, 30% of our students were considered chronically absent last semester, which is better than the state average. More importantly, we are making progress – that number is down from the end of 2023, which was 34%,” said Jameson.
One factor in the state’s high absenteeism is inconsistency in how attendance is reported, according to a Legislative Finance Committee analysis. The Public Education Department was instructed in 2019 through the signing of the Attendance for Success Act to collect attendance data and confirm school districts are reporting “consistently and correctly.”
Guidance from the state department has been slow to reach districts.
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The New Mexico Public Education Department released data this week showing the absenteeism rate in the state dropped to 32.8% in the 2023-2024 school year. This is an almost 7 percentage point drop compared to the previous year.
The highest rate New Mexico has reported in the last several years was 40.73% in the 2021-2022 school year.
“We will continue to build on this momentum to foster an environment where consistent attendance is the norm, not the exception,” said Public Education Deputy Secretary Candice Castillo.
Only a handful of states have released data for the 2023-2024 school year and New Mexico so far leads with the highest rate.
Earlier this summer, state lawmakers received an update from Legislative Finance Committee analysts which showed New Mexico had the largest increase in students missing school between 2019 and 2023. The state’s rate jumped by 119% while the national increase was 71%.
Jameson said prevention and intervention efforts in Las Cruces also include the statewide partnership with the national organization Graduation Alliance and community partnerships with New Mexico State University social workers who provide attendance data, interns managing family caseloads and home visits with parents of absent students who were unreachable three times.
According to the Public Education Department, efforts to address chronic absenteeism statewide also include the department’s “Be Here NM” campaign to spread awareness of the issue and training for districts and charter schools.
The department also noted the change from tracking “habitual truancy” to “chronic absenteeism,” which was meant to create better support for students and families struggling with attendance rather than punishment.
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