Boeing launched astronauts for the first time on Wednesday, becoming NASA’s second taxi service after SpaceX, albeit belatedly.
Two NASA test pilots have boarded Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft and blasted off to the International Space Station, becoming the first pilots to fly the new spacecraft.
The journey by Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams is expected to take 25 hours and they are due to arrive on Thursday. They will spend a little more than a week in the orbital laboratory before re-boarding the Starliner for a landing in a remote desert area in the western US on June 14.
Starliner’s crewed debut, delayed by years because of spacecraft defects, comes as the company struggles with unrelated safety issues on its aircraft.
Before the launch, Wilmore and Williams, a former Navy captain and former space station resident, repeatedly stressed that Boeing had full confidence in its ability to pull off the test flight. Starliner’s first test flight had to be redone with an unmanned vehicle in 2019 after a software glitch crippled it and before NASA allowed astronauts to fasten their seatbelts. The 2022 retry went much better, but later encountered problems with parachutes and flammable tape had to be removed from the capsule.
Wednesday’s launch was the third with astronauts aboard since early May, following two rocket-related problems over the weekend. A small helium leak from the spacecraft’s propulsion system also caused a delay, but managers determined the leak was manageable and not a safety issue.
“We know it’s been a long journey to get to this point,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said before the weekend postponement.
Boeing was tasked with ferrying NASA astronauts to the space station a decade ago, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. After the space shuttle was retired, NASA outsourced the job to two competing US companies, paying Boeing $4.2 billion and SpaceX just over half that amount, using a modified capsule that had been used to ferry supplies to the station.
SpaceX launched astronauts into orbit in 2020, becoming the first private company to achieve a feat previously achieved by only three other countries: Russia, the United States and China. The company has sent nine astronauts to the space station for NASA and three private groups for a Houston company that operates charter flights.
The launch from Cape Canaveral marked rocket manufacturer United Launch Alliance’s 100th Atlas V launch. It was the first time astronauts had boarded an Atlas rocket, typically used to launch satellites and other spacecraft, since John Glenn’s Mercury era more than 60 years ago.
Despite the Atlas V’s flawless record, the human presence ratcheted up tensions for the dozens of NASA and Boeing employees gathered at Mission Control Centers in Cape Canaveral and Houston.
Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon are designed to be fully autonomous and reusable, and Wilmore and Williams will sometimes manually pilot the Starliner on its way to the space station to check out its systems.
If the mission goes well, NASA will alternate between SpaceX and Boeing for taxiing flights starting next year. Mike Fink, the backup pilot for that test flight, will also be aboard Starliner’s next flight.
“When you get a new spacecraft, you have to learn everything about it, so this was great training,” Finke told reporters over the weekend.
