#manned #flight #Starliner #prepared #pilots #counting #hours
American company Boeing is preparing for its first manned space mission. In just five days, they will try to send two astronauts to the International Space Station in a Starliner capsule. According to the plans, it was originally supposed to be ready in 2017, and Boeing received almost 100 billion crowns from NASA for production. But the project faced a number of problems.
After more than fourteen years of painful development, the Starliner capsule is finally ready for crewed flight. Pilots Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are already lined up at the Kennedy Space Center, counting down the hours to launch. It should be on Tuesday night at half past four in the morning CET.
“Are we expecting everything to be perfect? This is the first flight of this manned ship. I’m sure we’ll find out a lot of things during the flight. That’s why we’re doing this. It’s a trial, a test flight,” said NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore.
In addition to people on Earth, the astronauts on the ISS are also looking forward to the trip. One of the members of the welcoming delegation will be the oldest serving astronaut, 65-year-old Michael Barratt. “The arrival of a brand new machine, the first flight of a new generation spacecraft with a crew is a really big deal. You don’t leave anything to chance,” he said.
It is the first crewed arrival of the Starliner capsule, but it is not the first private module to reach the ISS. Boeing leapfrogged Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It has been sending astronauts into space for four years with the help of the CrewDragon module. And it received almost half less money from NASA for development than Boeing.
“What if we just chose Boeing? We’d still be on Earth. We’d still be dependent on the Russians,” noted NASA chief Bill Nelson.
The first and moreover unsuccessful test was undertaken by Boeing in 2019, but the module did not reach orbit. In 2021, the valves failed again. The first successful flight was two years ago.
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