KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Even a successful crewed test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle could create a temporary hiccup in plans to exchange seats between commercial crew vehicles and Soyuz spacecraft going to the International Space Station.
At a May 3 briefing here, NASA and Boeing officials said they had completed a launch readiness review for Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than 10:34 p.m. Eastern May 6 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. Officials said they were working no issues with the spacecraft, and forecasts called for a 95% chance of acceptable launch weather.
The CFT mission is intended to be the final test flight for Starliner before NASA certifies it for use on crew rotation missions to the ISS. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will put the spacecraft through its paces on the mission, slated to last a little more than a week.
“It’s exciting to bring in Starliner and the ULA Atlas 5,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the briefing. “We’ve been striving for commercial crew to have two independent space transportation systems. That’s been our goal from commercial crew’s inception and we’re very close to reaching that goal.”
A successful CFT mission would allow NASA to certify the vehicle in time for an early 2025 launch of the first operational Starliner mission, designated Starliner-1. NASA has already announced three of the crew members for that flight: NASA astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk.
The fourth person to fly on that mission has not yet been assigned. “The final crew assignment for Starliner-1 will be announced following review and approval by the agency and its international partners,” NASA said in November when it announced the addition of Kutryk to the crew.
Since the Crew-5 mission in the fall of 2022, one seat on commercial crew…
Read the full article here
