BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – NASA Administrator Bill Nelson held a news conference Friday at Kennedy Space Center ahead of the first crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
The Boeing Crew Flight Test is currently set to take off at 10:34 p.m. Monday, May 6, from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. As of Friday, there is a 95% chance for favorable weather conditions at launch time.
The flight test seeks to take NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore the International Space Station with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in hopes that NASA then certifies Starliner for rotational missions as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, following the footsteps of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
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Friday’s event — what the agency said would begin no earlier than one hour after completion of Launch Readiness Review — featured the following participants:
- Steve Stich, manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program
- Dana Weigel, manager, NASA’s International Space Station Program
- Jennifer Buchli, chief scientist, NASA’s International Space Station Program
- Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager, Commercial Crew Program, Boeing
- Gary Wentz, vice president, Government and Commercial Programs, ULA
- Brian Cizek, launch weather officer, 45th Weather Squadron, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station
The capsule’s first crewed flight test has been delayed for nearly a year as Boeing grapples with continued technical issues and the project as a whole is running years behind schedule. Questions to the astronauts of confidence and safety, however, have so far been met with optimism.
News 6′s James Sparvero asked Nappi what the source of his confidence was, working through the last few years of delays.
“We go through a pretty rigorous process to get here and really where my source of confidence comes from is going through that process and getting the alignment that I talked about earlier. We work very, very closely with NASA with everything we do, from the factory floor to the software to all of our engineering design and our certification products, and we’ve come to the point where we are all in total agreement. You can’t be more confident than that,” Nappi said.
Watch the news conference again in the video player below:
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