BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — On Thursday, a Boeing Starliner made a cautious, one-mile-per-hour trek out to the launch pad atop a ULA Atlas V rocket ahead of the spacecraft’s first crewed flight to the International Space Station.
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Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain at the space station for about a week to test the Starliner and its subsystems to help NASA certify the spacecraft for regular missions to the ISS as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
“When this is done, hopefully successfully, they’re going to alternate, they’re going to rotate between Starliner and Crew Dragon, and then we’ll have dissimilar redundancy,” Dr. Ken Kremer with Space UpClose said.
Teams must still conduct a series of vehicle inspections and tests ahead of launch.
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 1 at 12:25 p.m.
Read: Starliner crew back in Florida, Saturday test launch to ISS remains set
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