The Boeing Starliner spacecraft whose unreliability has stranded two astronauts aboard the International Space Station – until February 2025 at the earliest – landed safely and intact at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico early Saturday, CNN reports. For all the caution being exercised with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams staying in orbit until a SpaceX mission can be launched to return them home for fear the creaky Boeing capsule could break apart on reentry, the landing was actually a milestone achievement for American spaceflight: It’s the first time a US capsule parachuted down on dry land rather than splashing down in the ocean.

NASA Commercial Crew program manager Steve Stich said an overabundance of caution played a role in Williams and Wilmore’s extended stay in orbit, but the modeling of the landing procedure left the risks unacceptably high. “Now we’ve landed a capsule in the US on land. The entry in particular has been darn near flawless, so that – I wouldn’t say it surprised me – but as I step back and think about the mission, the entry itself was just, and the deorbit burn was spot on.”

“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. From a human perspective, 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. We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board,” Stich continued, not exactly regretting playing it safe either.