After years of delays, Boeing will finally launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on its Starliner spacecraft.
The capsule is scheduled to lift off from the top of an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Monday at 10:34 p.m. ET. Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams will fly the Starliner on its first crewed flight, a move NASA has made to Boeing to fly regular flights to the space station. This will be an important final test before approval.
The stakes are high. This marks Boeing's first launch with humans aboard a spacecraft, and comes after years of delays, technical setbacks and significant budget overruns. If the flight is successful, Boeing could challenge the dominance of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has shuttled NASA astronauts to and from orbiting bases since 2020.
Both companies' spacecraft were developed under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which was established after the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011. Goal: To encourage and fund the development of new commercial spacecraft capable of flying to and from low Earth orbit. .
In a pre-flight briefing last week, Wilmore said safety was a top priority and that previous Starliner unmanned and manned launch attempts were postponed simply because the capsule was not ready.
“Why do we think it's as safe as it can be? If we didn't, we wouldn't be standing here,” Ms. Wilmore told reporters.
Still, new spacecraft and rockets come with inherent risks.
“Can we expect it to go perfectly? This is humanity's first spacecraft flight,” Wilmore said. “I'm sure we'll figure something out. That's why we're doing this. This is a test flight.”
The plan is for the astronauts to dock at the space station the next day. They will spend about a week there before returning to Earth. It then touched down at Starliner's main landing site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
NASA astronauts have been flying aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft for years, but NASA doesn't want to rely on a single company, says the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Fellow Makenna Young said.
“Having a second option is really important because it adds redundancy and resiliency,” Young says. “There's always redundancy in space systems, because if something goes wrong, you want to have a backup.”
Boeing's path to this first manned flight was full of ups and downs. In 2019, Starliner's unmanned debut was aborted when a software glitch caused the capsule to fail during an attempt to dock with the space station. Subsequent fuel valve problems caused several delays before Boeing successfully demonstrated that his 2022 Starliner could dock with her ISS and return to Earth.
Earlier this year, Boeing's aviation division came under fire after a panel exploded during a flight on one of the company's 737 Max 9 planes. Young said the catastrophe likely increased scrutiny of the company as a whole and raised the stakes for future Starliner flights.
“A successful launch will be a very important reminder that: [Boeing’s] It’s about ability,” she said. “They will be able to demonstrate that they are reliable operators who can complete difficult missions and continue to innovate.”
Young added that the challenges Boeing faced in getting Starliner this far show how difficult human spaceflight can be.
“I think we forget because we've been doing it for decades, but space is still a very challenging environment,” she said. “It's actually very difficult to get up off the ground properly.”
Williams said she and Wilmore are confident in the Starliner program and its future mission.
“We feel very safe and very comfortable when this spacecraft flies,” Williams told reporters earlier this week. “This is where we need to be.”