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Boeing’s Starliner Has Finally Launched a NASA Crew Into Space
Seven years behind schedule, on Monday Starliner will send two astronauts to space on a mission for NASA. The troubled company still has lots of catching up to do.
The Crew Flight Test mission is scheduled to launch on an Atlas V rocket at 10:34 pm EST and begin a 25-hour journey to the International Space Station, where its two passengers—Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams—will dock and spend about a week on board before returning home. Nearly a decade ago, in September 2014, NASA chose two companies —Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX —to design a new class of private spacecraft that could transport humans to low Earth orbit in the wake of the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011, “ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia” to reach the station, then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said at the time. On its return home, a heat shield keeps the occupants safe from temperatures of some 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, before the vehicle descends under parachute and finally touches down, with the help of air bags to cushion the fall, in one of several desert landing sites in the US.
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