(Bloomberg) — Boeing Co.’s long-delayed space taxi lifted off on Wednesday carrying its first astronauts bound for the International Space Station, a crucial test for the embattled aerospace titan and its key customer NASA.
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The CST-100 Starliner took off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 10:52 a.m. local time.
The flight is ongoing. The capsule, carrying veteran NASA astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, separated from the ULA rocket about 15 minutes into the mission. Starliner then fired its thrusters and reached a stable orbit about 30 minutes after liftoff.
“You’re seeing lots of happy faces and cheers here (in Houston) and there in Florida,” Brandi Dean, a public affairs officer at NASA said on a live webcast. “Everybody is glad to see Starliner is safely in orbit.”
The craft will perform a series of maneuvers to put it on course to link up with the space station around 12:15 p.m. Florida time Thursday for a roughly week-long stay.
Wednesday’s test is the culmination of years of delays caused by technical glitches and failures with the Starliner craft. Those include an earlier botched 2019 test flight and fresh concerns over the past month of a still-unresolved helium leak NASA is monitoring throughout the mission.
NASA is using the flight to prove Starliner can safely carry people to and from the ISS under the US space agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion and Elon Musk’s SpaceX $2.6 billion to create vehicles to ferry the agency’s astronauts to space. While Starliner has fallen seven years behind schedule, SpaceX has launched nine separate crews to the space station for NASA since 2020.
Boeing and NASA first tried to launch on May 6, but the flight was halted hours before takeoff due to an oddly behaving pressure valve in the Atlas V rocket. Boeing further delayed the launch by a few weeks to investigate a small helium leak on Starliner.
A June 1 attempt was called off less than four minutes before takeoff after a launch computer needed for the final stages of flight was slow to respond.
Ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Wilmore noted the American flags he’d seen earlier that day, including on the Atlas V rocket itself.
“We think that represents unity and resilience and unified efforts for the common good,” he said minutes before the launch. “Suni and I are honored to share this dream of spaceflight with each and every one of you.”
–With assistance from Julie Johnsson.
(Updates with background on Starliner’s development from eighth paragraph.)
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