(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, is expected to reach a stable orbit about 30 minutes after liftoff. The craft will then perform a series of maneuvers to put it on course to link up with the space station on 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.
–With assistance from Julie Johnsson.
(Updates with details on the mission)
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