May 6 (UPI) — After four years of delays, the Boeing Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to undertake a 10-day shakedown mission as soon as Monday.
If all goes well, the CST-100 Starliner will launch its first crewed mission at 10:34 p.m. EDT Monday from Space Launch Complex-41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
NASA astronauts and test pilots Suni Williams, 58. and Butch Wilmore, 61, will take the spacecraft on its mission to dock with the International Space Station before returning to Earth seven days later.
Their mission is a shakedown run to ensure all systems work as planned and to certify the spacecraft for manned missions afterward.
“This has been a developmental process where we’ve been involved and ensconced in that process,” Wilmore said during a virtual news conference Wednesday.
“All the way from hardware and software evaluations in the simulator, we’ve got our fingerprints on every single procedure in this process,” he said. “That’s what the test process is.”
Wilmore and Williams are U.S. Navy-trained test pilots and have helped develop the Starliner capsule, which measures 15 feet in diameter and is about the same shape as an Apollo capsule that helped NASA put a man on the moon in 1969.
If Monday night’s launch goes as planned, Williams, Wilmore and the Starliner will spend 24 hours traveling to the rendezvous point for docking with the space station and will take another day to return to Earth at the end of the mission.
“Our mission is primarily a test mission to check out flying the spacecraft to the space station, docking and then checking it out while it’s docked to ensure it can be a safe haven that can remain docked for a number of months,” Williams said.
Both test pilots participated in space shuttle and Soyuz missions to the International Space Station, where each has spent six months on the Earth-orbiting space laboratory.
Those missions required them to complete established training programs that NASA developed based on “years and years of experience,” Wilmore said. “This has not been that.”
They are working with mission engineers to determine the best procedures to help ensure future successful missions.
Williams said at times during earlier missions she’s wondered why something was done in a particular way instead of one she thought would be better.
“This is our opportunity to lay that groundwork, so in the future, we hope people won’t ask why we did it one way or another,” she said. “We want to make it as best as possible” for future missions. We are the ones working with the engineering team to make all of that happen.”
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket will carry the Starliner and its crew into space. A parachute and airbag-assisted landing is scheduled in the southwestern United States.
Williams and Wilmore will suit up in their flight suits 5 hours before launch to prevent nitrogen narcosis during the launch.
They also have their pre-flight plans for entertainment while on their way to the launch pad.
They’ll travel to the launch pad in a customized and appropriately named Airstream Astrovan II.
“It’s epic,” Wilmore said of the Astrovan. “It’s got a big video screen in the back.”
“As you would expect [from] two Navy test pilots, you know what movie we put on,” he said. “Of course it’s Top Gun: Maverick,” but edited to only include the flight and dramatic scenes.
Wilmore said they’ll watch it again on the trip back after touching down in the Desert Southwest to conclude their return from the shakedown mission.
The Starliner’s first manned mission originally was planned to occur four years earlier, but a test mission in 2019 failed to reach the International Space Station.
A 2022 test flight accomplished that feat, but neither of those test flights carried a flight crew. Monday’s planned launch will be the first to have humans on board.
A series of software and hardware failures doomed the unmanned 2019 test flight, but it landed successfully at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Boeing engineers identified the problems that caused the first mission to fail and applied more than 80 fixes.
The improvements enabled the Starliner to successfully reach orbit, dock with the space station and return six days later with another successful landing in New Mexico during the 2022 mission.
Additional delays prevented the Starliner’s first manned launch due to problems with the spacecraft’s parachute lines and the discovery of flammable tape that might create a fire hazard inside the spacecraft.
NASA engineers said other issues also delayed the first manned mission, but they ironed out the wrinkles with Williams and Wilmore’s help.
NASA initially allocated $4.2 billion to Boeing to design and build the Starliner, and Boeing spent another $1.5 billion while developing it.
The spacecraft has manual and automatic steering capability and can carry up to four astronauts or a mix of crew and cargo for NASA missions to low-Earth orbit.
It’s designed to spend up to seven months docked at the International Space Station.
A service capsule and the Atlas rocket are expendable, but the crew capsule is designed to be used for up to 10 missions.
Williams gave the spacecraft its unofficial name, “Calypso,” which she chose in honor of legendary French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and his Calypso research vessel.
The test pilots say they are confident, well-trained and well-fed while preparing for the mission.
Unlike early NASA manned missions, such as the Apollo missions to the moon, Wilmore said theirs won’t include any “black zones” that would mean certain death if there were any failures while in those zones while heading for orbit, as was the case in prior space shuttle and Soyuz missions.
“You could not survive if you had certain failures” while in a black zone, Wilmore said. “This spacecraft does not have those.”
He said the Starliner will get them to the space station and back “with pinpoint accuracy,” which is needed because their chosen landing zone is a 4-kilometer circle in the southwestern United States.
They also have complete control to abort the mission.
“We can abort from the pad all the way through orbit,” Williams said. “That capability is great. We’re on the tippety-top end, so we’ll be OK.”
Williams said it was an honor for her and Wilmore to have participated in space shuttle and Soyuz missions and for them to bring that experience into a new space program.
If the mission launches as planned Monday night and returns successfully, NASA will certify the capsule it for future missions.
That certification could make Boeing a direct competitor to SpaceX, which has developed its commercial flight program that enables tourists to enter low-Earth orbit and return.
Boeing hasn’t announced plans for any commercial tourism adventures to space, but a successful mission would ensure potential competition for SpaceX.
