Authors: Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Boeing’s (NYSE:) Starliner space capsule will launch on Saturday in a much-delayed first manned test flight, marking a milestone in the beleaguered aerospace giant’s bid to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the astronaut launch business .
A CST-100 Starliner carrying two astronauts will launch at 12:25 a.m. ET (16:25 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, attached to an Atlas (NYSE:) V rocket developed by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United joint venture Launch Alliance (ULA).
The countdown to May 6 was halted just two hours before launch due to a faulty pressure valve on the Atlas rocket. Later, a helium leak and another problem were discovered in the Starliner’s propulsion system. According to Boeing and NASA, all have been resolved.
“It’s a test flight, and we know we’re going to learn some things,” Boeing vice president of commercial crew Mark Nappi said during a news conference Friday.
The jellybean-shaped capsule and crew are heading to the International Space Station (ISS), two years after the Starliner made its first test cruise to the orbital laboratory without astronauts on board.
Boeing, whose commercial aircraft business is collapsing after a series of crises involving its 737 MAX jets, needs a space victory for its Starliner venture, which is already several years behind schedule and more than $1.5 billion over budget.
The company is a long-time NASA contractor that has built decades-old modules for the ISS and rockets intended to carry astronauts to the Moon. But it had never before built its own operational spacecraft, which was complicated by years of software problems, technical glitches and changes in management of the Starliner program.
While Boeing struggled, SpaceX became a reliable orbital taxi for the U.S. space agency, supporting a up-to-date generation of private spacecraft that fly astronauts to low Earth orbit and, under the ambitious Artemis program, to the Moon and eventually Mars.
Starliner would compete directly with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which as of 2020 is the only NASA vehicle sending ISS crew members into orbit from US territory. NASA has long sought two trips to the station from the US, in addition to the joint astronaut flights it conducts with the Russian Soyuz rocket.
The inaugural crew of the seven-seat Starliner includes two experienced NASA astronauts: Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, a retired Navy captain and fighter pilot, and Sunita “Suni” Williams, 58, a former Navy helicopter test pilot with experience in flying over 30 different planes.
Each of them spent a total of 500 days in space during two ISS missions. Wilmore is the designated commander of Saturday’s flight with Williams in the pilot’s seat.
Although Starliner was designed to fly autonomously, the crew can take control of the spacecraft if necessary. The test flight requires Wilmore and Williams to practice manually maneuvering the vehicle on its way to the space station, where it will remain docked for at least eight days before returning to Earth.
If Boeing delays Saturday’s launch attempt, the company has backup launch capabilities on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday. And if it can’t arrive by Thursday, some Starliner and rocket components will need to be replaced or replenished, causing delays of weeks or potentially months due to conflicting schedules with other ULA and ISS missions.
Saturday’s flight is Atlas’ first crewed trip to space since earlier versions of the famed rocket dynasty first sent American astronauts, including John Glenn, into orbit as part of NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s.
If all goes according to plan, the capsule will reach the space station after about 26 hours of flight and dock at an orbiting research facility about 400 km above Earth.
Wilmore and Williams are expected to remain on the space station for about a week before taking the capsule back to Earth, where they will land with a parachute and an airbag in the southwestern U.S. desert – NASA’s first manned mission.
