NASA’s two oldest astronauts, 61-year-old Butch Wilmore and 58-year-old Suni Williams, are finally flying to the International Space Station aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
The United States has a new spaceship. The country’s sixth manned spacecraft since Alan Shepard became the first American in space with the Mercury capsule in 1961.
Gemini, Apollo, the space shuttle and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon followed. Also the Orion ship of the Artemis lunar missions, which has not yet completed its first flight with astronauts.
The third time was the charm. Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft lifted off aboard United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V rocket at 14:52 UTC on Wednesday and separated from the rocket’s Centaur stage 15 minutes later.
It is also a historic day for the Atlas rockets, which have not launched humans into space since the Mercury mission of Gordon Cooper, another of the first American astronauts, in 1963.
The launch was scheduled for May 6, but was canceled with the astronauts already seated for takeoff due to a problem with a liquid oxygen valve on the Atlas V rocket. When Boeing and NASA engineers checked the condition of the ship, they discovered which had a helium leak due to a defect in a rubber seal.
NASA decided that the leak (of about 200 grams of helium a day) did not pose an unacceptable risk to the mission, so it went ahead without asking Boeing to fix it, which would have taken months. As a result, Boeing had to devise an alternative method to deorbit the ship in the event of catastrophic failure.
When this was tied up, the second launch attempt was automatically aborted four minutes before takeoff due to a failure in a ULA ground computer.
To the International Space Station. If all goes well, the Starliner will dock within 25 hours at the International Space Station, where Wilmore and Williams will rendezvous with Expedition 71 in low Earth orbit.
This first crewed flight of the Starliner is designed to finish certifying the ship, so the astronauts won’t spend much time in space. They will spend eight to 10 days at the International Space Station doing all kinds of tests on the Starliner, such as an emergency simulation in which they will have to take refuge on board the spacecraft.
Wilmore and Williams have been in quarantine for more than a month, they have gone through two aborted launches and, this time, they are traveling to the ISS with some personal items such as t-shirts from their university alma maters and souvenirs from their families. Or in Sunita’s case, her two farmers.
It has taken Boeing a long time to get here. In 2010, NASA selected two companies to begin a new era of commercial flights to the ISS. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon first flew with two astronauts on board in 2020. It has since transported 50 people to space.
NASA awarded Boeing a fixed contract of $4.2 billion for its development, while SpaceX received $2.6 billion from the agency because it was already developing the Dragon cargo ship.
Boeing terribly mismanaged that fixed budget and the Starliner has suffered numerous delays. Almost a decade later, the company has ended up losing $2 billion out of pocket due to a series of increasingly worrying design flaws and vulnerabilities.
The most serious: Boeing, NASA and ULA had to repeat their uncrewed test flight due to a failure in its internal clock that prevented it from docking with the ISS. Since then, the Starliner has had problems with the propulsion system valves, the parachutes and even an inflatable tape that was wrapped around some cables.
Now they have finally taken off, to the joy of the engineers participating in the project, as well as the astronauts and their families.
Developing
Images | NASATV
