After years of delays and setbacks, Boeing plans to launch two veteran astronauts to the International Space Station on Monday night aboard its Starliner spacecraft.
After years of delays, Boeing is finally set to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on its Starliner spacecraft.
The capsule is scheduled to lift off Monday at 10:34 p.m. ET, atop an Atlas V rocket at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams will pilot the Starliner on its inaugural crewed flight — a crucial final test before NASA can authorize Boeing to conduct routine flights to and from the space station for the agency.
The stakes are high. This will be Boeing’s first launch with humans aboard its spaceship, and it comes after years of delays, technical setbacks and significant budget overruns. If successful, the flight will enable Boeing to challenge the dominance held by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the orbiting outpost since 2020.
This is the last flight of an Atlas V, too. Kind of odd to launch Starliner on this when they’re going to need to start testing over for the replacement rocket - Vulcan Centaur.
I don’t know a lot about either program, but it seems pretty reasonable to test one new system with other stuff that’s well-understood and reliable, rather than stacking multiple new tests atop one another
I only work in dumbass terrestrial systems administration, and even we do that (mostly because I pitch a fit when they try to test more than one thing at a time)
That’s a good point.
Not all that odd for NASA, unfortunately. They’re always beholden to bureaucratic and political bullshit that forces this sort of thing on them.
They’re still going to launch the 6 operational starliner flights on Atlas V’s, and Amazon has bought several of them for their Kuiper satellite constellation.
Personally I doubt starliner is going to keep flying once the 6 ISS missions are over, regardless of launch vehicle.
Its a perfect excuse to create more jobs.
Efficiency is antithetical to the goals of a jobs program.