Boeing is playing big: this Monday at 4:30 am (French time) its Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, the mission of which is to reach the Space Station (ISS) with two astronauts on board . A necessary step to obtain confirmation from NASA before undertaking, in this case, scheduled flights to the Space Station (ISS). The takeoff can be viewed live on NASA’s YouTube channel.
In detail, the Starliner capsule will be launched into orbit by ULA’s Atlas V rocket. On board are American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two veterans who have spent nearly 500 days in space.
Both come from the US Navy and each has already visited the ISS twice aboard the Space Shuttle and then on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But here this mission is both special and even more risky. “Everything is new, everything is unique, the ship itself, the way it flies,” said Butch Wilmore, adding: “I don’t think any of us ever dared dream of being associated with the first flight at all.” new ship. “
Once in space, astronauts will temporarily fly the spacecraft manually to test the operation of this mode. Starliner will dock with the ISS on Wednesday. The ship will stay there for just over a week before returning to Earth.
Astronauts such as Boeing and NASA expect new unforeseen events to be the focus of this mission, which aims to discover whether a grain of sand remains. “This will be only the sixth time in the history of American spaceflight that NASA astronauts will fly on a new spacecraft,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space-X programs. “
A series of delays
Ten years after NASA placed a $4.2 billion order with Boeing ($2.6 billion from SpaceX) to develop these ships, the stakes in this mission are critical. The American agency will be able to have at its disposal another ship in addition to the SpaceX ship to transport astronauts. And for Boeing, this may be the end of a long tunnel of failure with this machine, while its rival Space X now has proven technology.
In 2019, during the first unmanned test, the capsule failed to reach the correct trajectory and returned before reaching the ISS. Then, in 2021, while the rocket was on the launch pad for another flight attempt, a problem with blocked capsule valves led to another flight delay. The empty ship finally managed to reach the ISS in May 2022.
Boeing had hoped at the time that it would be able to carry out the first manned flight as early as 2022, but problems discovered late, particularly with the parachutes that brake the capsule as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, again caused delays.
“There were a number of surprises that we had to overcome,” Boeing Chief Executive Mark Nappi said at a news conference. But “it made our teams very strong and made us proud of how they overcame every challenge.” In conclusion: “It is quite typical that it takes ten years to develop a human spacecraft.”
Source: Le Parisien
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