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We now know who gets to take Boeing’s Starliner capsule for its first manned test drive.
NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams will fly on Crew Flight Test (CFT), Starliner’s first manned mission to the International Space Station, the agency announced today (June 16). Wilmore will command the mission, with Williams serving as pilot and fellow NASA astronaut Mike Fincke training as a backup pilot.
“Mike Fincke has devoted the last nine years of his career to these early Boeing missions and Suni to the last seven. Butch has done a fantastic job leading the team as the spacecraft commander since 2020,” Reid Wiseman, head of the Astronaut Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement (opens in new tab)†
Related: Boeing’s Starliner, a next-generation spaceship
“It was great to watch Starliner’s successful journey to the International Space Station during the Orbital flight test 2 (OFT-2) mission last month,” Wiseman added. “We’re all looking forward to cheering on Butch and Suni as they fly the first crewed Starliner mission.”
OFT-2 was an unmanned shakeout cruise to the orbiting laboratory that launched on May 19 and landed on May 25. The success of that mission appears to have paved the way for CFT, though NASA and Boeing are still analyzing OFT-2 data to determine what fixes or upgrades, if any, are needed before Wilmore and Williams can climb aboard? starliner†
Those data reviews will likely take at least another month. NASA aims to complete a review of its launch schedule for CFT by the end of July, agency officials said in today’s statement.
The test flight will take off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, as OFT-2 did. CFT is expected to last about two weeks, although that and other mission parameters aren’t set in stone; NASA could extend the duration of CFT to six months if necessary, agency officials said in today’s statement, and it could also add a third astronaut to the flight.
If all goes well with CFT, NASA will move to certify Starliner for operational manned flights to and from the space station. Agency astronaut Jeannette Epps is training to fly on the first of those missions, dubbed Starliner-1, NASA officials said in today’s statement. But she also trains on SpaceXs Dragon capsule in case circumstances prompt her to fly that vehicle instead.
NASA signed astronaut taxi contracts with both Boeing and SpaceX in 2014. SpaceX is already fully operational, launching five manned missions to the station so far using Dragon and the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. That number includes the SpaceX version of CFT, a two-person test flight called Demo-2 that launched in May 2020.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab)† follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on facebook (opens in new tab)†
