Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Boeing’s (NYSE:) new Starliner astronaut capsule is set to launch on Saturday on a much-delayed first crewed test flight, a major milestone in the struggling aerospace giant’s bid to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in business of launching astronauts.
The CST-100 Starliner, with two astronauts on board, is scheduled to lift off at 12:25 pm ET (1625 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, strapped to an Atlas (NYSE:) V rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch joint venture . Alliance (ULA).
The May 6 countdown was stopped just two hours before launch due to a faulty pressure valve on the Atlas rocket. The Starliner’s propulsion system was subsequently found to have a helium leak and another problem. According to Boeing and NASA, all problems have been resolved.
“This is a test flight, we know we have some things to learn,” Boeing vice president of commercial crew Mark Nappi said at a news conference Friday.
The candy-shaped capsule and its crew are heading to the International Space Station (ISS), two years after Starliner completed its first test flight to the orbiting laboratory without astronauts on board.
Boeing, whose commercial jet business has been stymied by a series of 737 MAX crises, needs a win in space for its Starliner operation, which is already several years behind schedule and more than $1.5 billion over budget. .
The company is a longtime NASA contractor that built modules for the decades-old International Space Station and rockets designed to carry astronauts to the Moon. But it had never built its own operational spacecraft before, a feat complicated by years of software problems, technical glitches and shakeups in the management of the Starliner program.
While Boeing has struggled, SpaceX has become a reliable taxi into orbit for the US space agency, which is backing a new generation of privately built spacecraft to fly astronauts into low Earth orbit and, under its ambitious Artemis program, to the Moon and beyond. Mars after all.
Starliner will compete with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which has been NASA’s only vehicle since 2020 to send ISS crew members into orbit from US soil. NASA has long sought two trips by American astronauts to the station to complement the astronaut-sharing missions it conducts with the Russian Soyuz rocket.
The seven-passenger Starliner’s inaugural crew includes two veteran NASA astronauts: Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, a retired U.S. Navy captain and fighter pilot, and Sunita “Suni” Williams, 58, a former Navy helicopter test pilot with flight experience. . more than 30 different aircraft.
They spent a total of 500 days in space on two missions to the ISS each. Wilmore has been named commander of Saturday’s flight, while Williams will take the pilot’s seat.
Although Starliner is designed for autonomous flight, a crew can take over control of the spacecraft if necessary. During the test flight, Wilmore and Williams will practice manually maneuvering the craft on its way to the space station, where it will remain docked for at least eight days before returning to Earth.
If Boeing delays its launch attempt on Saturday, the company has backup launch capabilities on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday. And if it can’t arrive Thursday, some elements on Starliner and the rocket will need to be replaced or replenished, leading to delays of weeks or possibly months given conflicting schedules with other ULA and ISS missions.
Saturday’s flight marks the first crewed Atlas flight into space since earlier versions of the legendary rocket dynasty first sent American astronauts, including John Glenn, into orbit during NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s.
If all goes according to plan, the capsule will arrive at the space station after a flight of about 26 hours and dock with the orbiting research station about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
Wilmore and Williams are expected to stay on the space station for about a week before riding a capsule back to Earth for a parachute-and-airbag landing in the US desert southwest – a first for a crewed NASA mission.