Watch live today as NASA astronauts fly to launch site for 1st crewed Boeing Starliner mission to ISS
The first Starliner crew will arrive at their launch area today (April 25), and you can watch the events live here at Space.com.
The two NASA astronauts to fly aboard Boeing Starliner, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, will journey from Houston to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) near Orlando, Florida for their historic launch presently scheduled for May 6. Aside from being the first humans to fly on Starliner, the duo will also be the first astronauts on board the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket.
You can watch the crew’s arrival at KSC starting at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) in the video just above, courtesy of NASA TV.
Wilmore and Williams, both veteran NASA astronauts and former U.S. Navy test pilots, will be tasked with testing Starliner during this first crewed launch to the International Space Station. Their Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission will be roughly a week long with the goal of certifying Starliner for future space station rotation missions that will last about six months each.
Boeing, alongside SpaceX, was tasked by NASA in 2014 to send commercial crew missions to the ISS. (NASA used to ferry most of its astronauts there using the space shuttle, and temporarily pivoted fully to using Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft between the shuttle’s retirement in 2011 and SpaceX’s first crewed mission in 2020.)
Boeing’s commercial crew contract for Starliner is valued at $4.2 billion, compared to SpaceX’s $2.6 billion. But while SpaceX has sent 11 crews to the ISS aboard Crew Dragon, Starliner was delayed by four years amid numerous technical problems.
Starliner’s first uncrewed flight to the ISS in 2019 failed to reach its destination. After implementing dozens of fixes, Starliner’s second ISS flight (also without astronauts) made it there and back in 2022. The first crewed spaceflight for Starliner got delayed in 2023 after more issues were found with the spacecraft, with its main parachutes (the suspension lines carried less load than engineers thought) and wiring (largely covered with flammable P213 tape).
Mission representatives as well as the astronauts themselves told reporters last month, during media activities at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, that these issues have been solved ahead of CFT’s launch.
Related: 1st Boeing Starliner astronauts are ready to launch to the ISS for NASA (exclusive)
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The crew entered quarantine on Tuesday (April 23) at JSC, roughly a week after visiting KSC, to see Starliner make a six-mile (10-kilometer) journey between buildings before getting integrated with the Atlas V. Engineers are testing communications between the rocket and spacecraft before the stacked rocket rolls out to its KSC launch pad.
A flight readiness review is ongoing this week by NASA and Boeing officials, and a press conference is expected later today around 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) that will also run here live on Space.com. NASA’s commercial crew program gave CFT its “go for launch” on April 18, following a flight test readiness review, officials wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
If CFT’s flight goes to plan, the first operational mission (Starliner-1) is set to fly in early 2025 at the earliest. On board Starliner-1 will be NASA’s Scott Tingle, NASA’s Mike Fincke and the Canadian Space Agency‘s Joshua Kutryk. If successful, Boeing will then join SpaceX and Russia, which flies some NASA astronauts to the ISS for technical and policy reasons, in delivering regular space station crews for normal half-year rotations.