Boeing's Starliner Finally Launches With Astronauts Onboard

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner finally gave SpaceX a little competition for travel from Florida to Earth's orbit when it launched Wednesday with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V.

The duo’s test flight began at 10:52 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station—a little over four years after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon broke a Russian monopoly on crew transportation to space. It was the 100th Atlas V launch, but the first with people at the pointy end of a version of that rocket modified for human spaceflight.

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The vehicle’s two RD-180 liquid-fueled engines ignited seconds before T-0, followed by two small solid-fueled rocket boosters that combined to send the rocket sprinting into a mostly clear sky. Starliner proceeded smoothly through SRB burnout and jettison, first-stage cutoff, separation, and then a burn of the Atlas V’s Centaur second stage to take it to the verge of orbit. 

Fifteen minutes after Starliner left Earth, the spacecraft was flying free in space—which, as NASA’s commentators noted, allowed the astronauts to put aside printed checklists and break out tablet computers. 

Wilmore radioed down a message to ULA, formed in 2006 as a joint venture between the space divisions of Lockheed Martin and Boeing: "They’ve been a member of the family for a long time, but now it’s official, and we want to welcome them to human spaceflight."

A brief burn of Starliner’s own engines 30 minutes after launch took it the rest of the way to orbit. The capsule that Williams christened Calypso now heads to the International Space Station for a scheduled docking at 12:15 Eastern on Thursday. Its cargo includes a urine processor to extract potable water to replace a broken ISS unit.

The mission schedule calls for the two astronauts to spend eight days on the ISS, then return to Earth to land under parachutes and cushioned by airbags on one of a few designated desert landing sites in the western United States. 

This successful debut of the spacecraft Boeing designed and built under a fixed-price contract for NASA gives the beleaguered Arlington, Va., aerospace company a break from a series of self-inflicted wounds, including an improperly installed door plug getting blown out of an Alaska Airlines-operated 737 Max 9.

A Win for Boeing

It also makes the United States the first country that can choose which model of spacecraft its astronauts fly to orbit from its soil—in addition to the Russian Soyuz capsules that continue to carry astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS and back.

Wednesday’s launch followed two scrubs. Flight controllers called off a May 6 attempt because of an issue with a liquid-oxygen valve on the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage, then delayed it further to troubleshoot small helium leaks in Starliner’s maneuvering engines. Then a glitch with one of the computers sequencing a June 1 launch attempt scrubbed it with only three minutes and 50 seconds left in the countdown.

Under NASA’s original vision, Starliner might have flown seven years ago. After the agency resisted Congressional pressure to hand a single crew-transportation contract to Boeing and instead picked both Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft—a $4.2 billion award to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX—NASA projected a first flight in 2017.

The smaller sum awarded to SpaceX has been money vastly better spent, with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon returning astronaut launches to American soil after an almost nine-year gap with its May 30, 2020, crewed mission to the ISS. Meanwhile, Boeing’s costs have rocketed past that fixed-price award, with the company reporting last June that its losses had hit almost $1.5 billion. 

Starliner’s first uncrewed launch in 2019 suffered a series of serious software problems that left it unable to dock with the ISS and could have resulted in the loss of the vehicle itself. Its second flight test, delayed after extensive work to fix valve problems, didn’t happen until May 2022, after which Boeing had to replace part of the capsule’s electrical wiring and tweak its parachute design.

'You Always Want to Have a Backup Position'

For NASA, having Starliner as a Plan B—even though Dragon’s reliability and the reusability of booster stages on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 have vindicated NASA’s faith in outsourcing orbital spacecraft to private industry—goes back to the agency’s emphasis on redundancy.

“You always want to have a backup position,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a taped interview during the June 1 broadcast. 

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Starliner can accommodate up to seven astronauts, but NASA plans to fly four to the ISS on the six operational missions it has booked after this test launch. 

Boeing’s commercialization plans for its capsule aren’t as far along as SpaceX’s, which have now featured Axiom’s private flights of Dragon to the ISS. But Boeing does intend to have Starliner fly to the Orbital Reef commercial space station it’s developing with Sierra Space and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, supported by $172 million in funding from NASA.

NASA has been sending astronauts to orbit for more than 60 years, but Starliner’s liftoff was only the sixth time astronauts have flown a new vehicle to orbit from American soil, following Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and Dragon.

The expendable launch vehicle underneath Starliner itself encapsulates much of that history as well as that of the Cold War and its aftermath. 

The Atlas V, a workhorse for civilian and military satellite launches since 2002, takes its name from a series of rockets that go back all of those 60-plus years. NASA’s first Atlas rockets, based on a line of US Air Force ICBMs, took Mercury astronauts to orbit starting with John Glenn’s launch in 1962 and represent “Atlas V’s great-grandaddy,” as ULA CEO Tory Bruno said during NASA’s June 1 coverage. 

Decades later, the Atlas V lifts off with RD-180 engines built in Russia—which at the time of that rocket’s design outperformed anything comparable in the States and kept ex-Soviet rocket engineers gainfully employed. But that supply chain became a liability after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and led ULA to develop its Vulcan rocket around Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines. Vulcan flew for the first time in January. 

While some of the remaining Atlas V launches will launch Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit broadband service, this rocket is now set to end its career in the same way the original Atlas came to fame: sending Americans to space.