BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – The astronauts planning to head to space aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Thursday ahead of another attempt to launch the vessel.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at Kennedy Space Center around 1 p.m.
“Greeting these astronauts on the runway always gets me excited because it means we’re in the final days before launch and that’s always a great day for us,” said Kennedy Space Center Associate Director Jen Kunz.
Wilmore and Williams are preparing to go to the International Space Station as part of the Boeing Crew Flight Test for Starliner. The spacecraft is expected to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday, May 6. The target launch time is 10:34 p.m.
Wilmore was asked how crucial it was, from where he stands, that the first crewed flight of Starliner go off as perfectly as it can.
“You know that adage you’ve heard since Apollo 13? ‘Failure is not an option,’ and that has nothing specifically to do with Boeing or this program, that’s all things that we do in human spaceflight, so it’s no more or less important than anything else we’re doing. It just happens to be the most important one we’re doing right now. Supporting the crew on orbit is the thing we’re doing, but come May 6, this will be the focus and this mission, of course, going off well, of course we want it to do that,” Wilmore said. “Do we expect it to go perfectly? This is the first human flight for the spacecraft. I’m sure we’ll find things out. That’s why we do this. This is a test flight.”
The Starliner capsule’s first crewed flight test has been delayed for nearly a year as Boeing grapples with continued technical issues. The project is running years behind schedule.
If the flight test is successful, Starliner can be certified for commercial flight missions to the ISS, like SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Given the delays for the mission, News 6′s James Sparvero asked the astronauts why they believe the spacecraft is as safe as possible.
Wilmore said they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t ready.
“We make it look easy for the general public in general because you see the launch go and everything seems to work out well, you might have anomaly, a little thing here or there, but it is not easy to do what we do. It is not easy to make sure that the metallurgy and the rocket engines is correct, that all the various bolts and everything are torqued down to the right setting. It’s not easy to do all those things,” Wilmore said. “We want the general public to think it’s easy, but it’s not, it’s way hard. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t ready. We are ready. The spacecraft’s ready and the teams are ready, and that’s the message that I think you would expect to hear at this point, else we wouldn’t be here.”
Williams chimed in as well, adding kudos to her training team.
“All the folks who have been working with us in mission control as well as the folks who are setting up the simulators have been with us in all of the technical debriefs, discussions, as we’re getting the spacecraft ready. They’re formulating the procedures that we’re going to perform based on all of the developmental tests that we’ve done in the simulators over the last, you know, couple of years. We had the kitchen sink essentially thrown at us the other day on an ascent sim and we came out fine, so I have all the confidence in not only our capabilities, the spacecraft capabilities, but also our mission control team who’s ready for the challenge and they’re up for it and they’re getting ready back in Houston,” Williams said.
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