CST-100 Starliner parachute test
Parachutes being developed for Boeing's CST-100 Starliner undergo a reliability test using a "dart" in place of the crew capsule.

An incident involving a test of parachutes for one commercial crew vehicle has heightened awareness of the challenges involved in developing those systems, as well as determining what constitutes an anomaly.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...