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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft successfully undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) at 6:04 p.m. Eastern Time earlier today after spending months in space. Starliner, which launched in June, was initially slated to return to Earth after a couple of weeks. Still, its return was delayed as the ship's thrusters malfunctioned during its ISS docking. This led to a months long investigation from NASA and Boeing, with things coming to a head last month when the agency decided that a lack of consensus among subject matter experts violated its rules for astronaut safety during missions.

After its undocking, Starliner will close its entry cover and proceed to thruster checkouts before teams on Earth decide whether to start a deorbit burn to start its entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Teams on the ground will decide whether to start the deorbit burn at 10:57 p.m. Eastern Time. If the decision is made to proceed with the burn, the ship will fire its thrusters twenty minutes later. Its deorbit burn will be the most important portion of Starliner's return journey, and if the ship performs according to plan, it will land at the White Sands landing site in New Mexico just after midnight.

Starliner's major milestone so far has been exiting the approach ellipsoid around the ISS. This increases the station's margin of safety, as it ensures that the ship does not approach the station for 24 hours even if it loses all of its thrusters.

The deorbit burn will fire the ship's four orbital maneuvering and attitude control (OMAC) thrusters for a 59 second burn to allow it to enter the Earth's atmosphere by slowing it down by 130 meters per second. If this burn is successful, then the ship should return safely to Earth, as its thrusters will have cleared a crucial burn for the landing profile.

Ahead of today's separation, NASA and Boeing ran simulations for the undocking as part of their preparations for the flight. During a pre departure news conference on Wednesday, NASA's Commercial Crew manager Steve Stich shared that Boeing might even run some thruster hot fires after Starliner exits the approach ellipsoid as part of the learning from the Boeing Crew Flight Test mission.

Starliner's undocking profile for today's mission was different from the one during its previous orbital flight test. This profile is designed to quickly remove the ship away from the ISS and be simpler than the other return profile. It also puts less stress on the ship's thrusters as Starliner relies primarily on its forward thrusters to move away from the station.

While their ship is now on its way to Earth, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will use SpaceX's Crew-8 Dragon, currently docked to the ISS, as their emergency escape ship. The astronauts are still not stuck or stranded on the station, according to Stich, as the NASA official shared during the latest conference that right now, "Crew-8 is their emergency return vehicle, and when Crew-9 gets there, that will be their vehicle, that will be their vehicle, that will be their return vehicle for nominal and any emergencies."