First flight
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The American company, four after its competitor SpaceX, is taking a NASA crew to the International Space Station for the first time, on the night of Monday May 6 to Tuesday May 7.
“It almost seems unreal,” declared American astronaut Sunita Williams at a press conference. We can easily believe it: after years of waiting, the spaceship Starliner of Boeing is finally ready to welcome a crew on its brand new seats to take them to the international space station (ISS). It will take off on Monday May 6 – well, Tuesday at 4:34 a.m. Paris time – from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida, with two veteran astronauts on board: Sunita Williams, therefore, and Barry Wilmore, both delighted to reconnect with their historic job as test pilot.
The project of this Starliner dates back to the 2000s. While the American space shuttle which carried out astronaut rotations on the ISS is heading towards retirement, NASA is seeking to replace it. A call for tenders is launched, to which several players in the astronautics industry respond. The most serious spacecraft projects are selected and financed, including that of Blue Origin, the company of billionaire Jeff Bezos, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Boeing (which received $4.2 billion) and SpaceX (2, 6 billion dollars). The development of these projects continues while the American shuttle ends up being truly stored in the hangar in 2011, and in this intermediate period, not very comfortable, the United States must count on their cooperation with the Russians to ensure the succession of the ‘ISS. All American astronauts
