Boeing sending first astronaut crew to space after years of delay
) is poised to send the first Starliner space capsule with a crew of humans into orbit next week, giving it a long-delayed chance to score a badly needed win as it struggles to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone," NASA associate administrator Jim Free told reporters in a pre-launch news conference. "The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake." A 2019 attempt to send an uncrewed Starliner to the ISS for a week failed, returning to Earth several days early, because of dozens of software and engineering issues.
Meanwhile, SpaceX's Crew Dragon has obtained several more flights from NASA as Boeing's Starliner remains in development. Boeing in 2022 made a second, successful attempt to launch Starliner to the ISS and back. The agency wants the redundancy of having two different U.S. rides to the ISS, an international science laboratory in Earth's orbit that is expected to retire around 2030 after continuously housing astronauts for three decades.
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