Summary
Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday night. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be at the controls for the ride into low-Earth orbit. They are set to join a small club of astronaut test pilots who have hands-on experience piloting a new type of spacecraft.
This will be the first time anyone has ever flown on the Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket will take off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The launch will be followed by a second flight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The second flight will be from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Boeing's first unpiloted Starliner test flight takes off Monday night. The capsule poised to launch is the same ship that flew into orbit on Boeing's first test flight in 2019. Both spacecraft are designed to ferry four people to and from low-Earth orbit.
Boeing's new Dragon spacecraft will be the first of its kind to reach space. The first flight of the new spacecraft will take place in 2018. The second flight will take off in 2019. The crew will be made up of two women and two men. The mission will take two years to complete.
Problems with the workhorse 737 airplane have put Boeing on the defensive. The company's chief executive has announced he is leaving his post by the end of this year. The Starliner program, too, has been troubled. The spacecraft's first unpiloted test flight in 2019 ended prematurely due to software problems.
Before becoming an astronaut, Wilmore's assignment in the Navy was to fly the service's new T-45 training jet off of an aircraft carrier. On that first flight, when the catapult launched his aircraft off the deck, it didn't give the aircraft as much speed as expected.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, and future crews are not going to have that luxury, so we want to find it all now,” says crew member. “There are people that know certain sections of it a lot better than us, but we know it better than just about anybody.”
