How to watch the historic astronaut flight take off

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Boeing’s spaceflight program could reach a major milestone Monday evening with the launch of its Starliner spacecraft, which will — finally — carry two NASA astronauts into orbit.

The mission, called Crew Flight Test, could depart from Space Force Station Cape Canaveral in Florida on Monday at 10:34 p.m. ET.

Live coverage of the event will be broadcast on NASA channels. According to Space Agency, it starts at 6:30 PM ET on Monday.

Ten years in the making, the event is the culmination of Boeing’s efforts to develop a spacecraft worthy of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

Development issues, test flight problems and other costly setbacks delayed the Starliner’s path to the launch pad. Meanwhile, SpaceX, a competitor to Boeing under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has become the preferred transportation provider for the space agency’s astronauts.

Now NASA and Boeing have finally deemed the Starliner spacecraft ready for the final test: allowing astronauts to test the vehicle in space.

Veteran NASA astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore will be aboard the mission Monday, taking the Starliner to the International Space Station for a weeklong stay.

During their journey, Willmore and Williams will conduct a series of tests, including briefly taking control of the autonomous spacecraft and evaluating how the vehicle functions for the astronauts.

The smooth flight could be a winning moment for Boeing’s spaceflight program and for the company overall, which has been in the top spot due to problems with its commercial aircraft division.

Here’s what you need to know about the Starliner flight ahead of the historic crew test flight.

Boeing officials sought to clarify that Starliner operates separately from the segment within the company responsible for commercial aircraft. The Starliner team’s primary concern is ensuring a smooth test mission and crew safety, said Mark Nappi, vice president and Starliner program manager at Boeing.

“We have people flying in this vehicle. We always take that seriously,” Nappi said on the news last week during the AD. “I have spent my entire career in this business and it has always been at the top of my list.”

Two Starliner astronauts waited years for the spacecraft to be ready to carry a crew. After rotating astronauts in and out of missions during the Starliner crew flight test, Wilmore He was assigned in 2020. NASA moved Williams to this flight in 2022 after initially assigning her to a later Starliner mission in 2018.

“We had a few launch dates and we thought, ‘Okay, we’re ready to go,’” Williams said at a conference on Wednesday. Press conference. “But now it feels like five days. It’s finally real, and I have to pinch myself a little to understand that we’re actually going.

At a press conference last month, Steve Stich, director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said NASA had asked Boeing and SpaceX to meet a certain threshold regarding the risk that the mission would result in astronaut deaths: 1 in 270.

He said: “Boeing exceeds this number by losing 1 in 295 crew members.”

Boeing was awarded the NASA contract to build the Starliner in 2014, at the same time the space agency selected SpaceX to build its Crew Dragon capsule.

NASA has awarded the companies deals worth a combined $6.8 billion, hoping that Boeing and SpaceX’s capsules will be ready to fly by 2017.

This prediction did not come true.

SpaceX took longer than planned, launching its first astronaut Crew Dragon capsule in the summer of 2020. Since then, it has completed 13 missions in orbit for NASA astronauts and paying customers.

But Boeing — even though NASA officials initially believed Starliner would be ready before SpaceX’s Crew Dragon — faced years of additional delays, setbacks and additional costs that have cost the company more than $1 billion, according to public financial records.

It’s worth noting that the first Starliner test mission, conducted without a crew in late 2019, was riddled with errors. The vehicle failed in orbit, a symptom of software problems, including a coding error that stopped the internal clock by 11 hours.

second unmanned flight test in 2022 Additional software issues and problems with some of the vehicle’s engines have been detected.

These disruptions delayed the first crewed flight until 2023. But then a new list of problems emerged: the spacecraft’s parachutes had some parts that were weaker than expected, and tape on the craft turned out to be flammable.

Boeing then had to remove this mile-long tape and conduct additional parachute tests.

Finally, after a decade of development, NASA and Boeing released the vehicle so astronauts could fly.

Williams and Willmore took a measured approach to answering questions about Starliner’s development issues.

“I understand when you say ‘setback,’” Wilmore said during the recent press conference. ‘But honestly, with all the discoveries we’ve made – that’s what we would call them – they have been steps forward.

“This wasn’t a setback, it was progress,” he said. “And our families went through it with us.”

Williams added that she was ready to go to the mission on Monday expecting minor problems to arise.

“We always find things, and we will always find things,” she said Wednesday. “Everything won’t be absolutely perfect when we fly the spacecraft. And that’s really our goal. We are at a point – all of us, a big team – at a point where we feel safe and comfortable with the way we are flying this spacecraft, and we have backups in case we need them.”

“We’re here because we’re ready,” Williams said.