The countdown is on for the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner space taxi, which comes after years of setbacks and $1.5 billion cost overruns.
Liftoff is scheduled for 10:34 p.m. ET (7:34 p.m. PT) today from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida. NASA and Boeing broadcast video coverage of Starliner’s countdown and launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
It will be the first time astronauts have been sent into orbit from a military launch pad – as opposed to NASA’s nearby Kennedy Space Center – since Apollo 7 in 1968. It will also be the first crewed launch on an Atlas rocket since the Mercury missions of the 1960s.
This mission will be nothing like anything NASA might have planned in the 1960s. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are heading to the International Space Station for what is essentially a test cruise aboard of the Starliner spaceship in the shape of a gumdrop.
“We have a lot to do: test it, make sure it’s ready to go, and make sure we can bring it back so more people can fly it in the future,” Williams said in a statement. NASA pre-launch video clip.
NASA chose Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to and from the space station a decade ago, following the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. The companies’ development costs were covered by contracts to fixed price worth $4.2 billion for Boeing and $2.6 billion for Boeing. for SpaceX.
Both companies encountered challenges while building and testing their spacecraft. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon entered service first. Crew Dragon Endeavor carried its first astronauts to the space station in 2020, and since then, Dragons have transported eight crews for NASA without a hitch. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, however, encountered a series of failures during an uncrewed test mission in 2019. It took years to resolve all the issues and safety lapses.
A resumption of uncrewed flight testing in 2022 paved the way for today’s crewed flight — but the terms of NASA’s contract required Boeing to cover $1.5 billion in additional expenses.
Wilmore and Williams are expected to arrive at the space station on Wednesday and spend about a week performing orbital checks of the reusable Starliner craft. Their spacecraft was named Calypso in honor of the late ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s famous research vessel.
At the end of the mission, they will descend on Calypso to a parachute and airbag assisted landing in New Mexico or elsewhere in the western United States, with the exact time and location to be determined based on the weather report.
Assuming all goes well during the demonstration mission, Boeing’s Starliner will join the rotation with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to transport astronauts to the space station every six months or so. Although only two astronauts are on board for this test mission, Starliner is designed to carry up to seven spaceplanes.
Having two types of commercial space taxis, as well as the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, will significantly increase the ability to get to and from the space station. “Multiple providers give you redundancy,” Wilmore explained.
And it’s not just the International Space Station, which is expected to be decommissioned in the early 2030s. Boeing and its Starliner space taxis are part of the team working on Orbital Reef, a commercial space station project led by Sierra Space and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company. Boeing also partnered with Space Adventures years ago on a plan to send customers into orbit on a commercial basis.
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