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Boeing’s Starliner Reaches Space Station Some 2 Years After Planned Visit
If it returns to Earth successfully next week, the space taxi built for NASA could carry astronauts to orbit later this year.
Science & Tech
A couple of years later than had been hoped, Boeing’s Starliner space taxi arrived at the International Space Station on Friday evening.
There were no astronauts inside for this trip, but it marked a crucial milestone that eluded Boeing during a troubled flight test in 2019, when the same uncrewed spacecraft failed to reach the orbiting outpost. The company spent two and a half years fixing a series of technical problems before getting Starliner back to the launchpad, falling behind SpaceX, which has since carried five crews to the space station for NASA.
The spacecraft is expected to spend four or five days at the space station before returning to Earth, parachuting to one of five landing sites in the western United States.
“We’ve learned so much from this mission over the last 24 hours,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said during a news conference after the docking.
A successful conclusion to the mission could provide NASA sufficient confidence to put astronauts on board for the next Starliner flight, which could occur by the end of the year.
Boeing is one of two companies that NASA has hired to take astronauts to and from the I.S.S. The contracts were issued in 2014, three years after NASA retired the space shuttles. The agency then had to rely on Russia to transport astronauts for nearly a decade. While SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is currently carrying crews to orbit, a second transportation option for NASA offers redundancy in case either spacecraft suffers an accident, and it prevents further reliance on Russia, which has become politically complicated since it invaded Ukraine earlier this year.