April 27 :
On May 6, aboard the first piloted flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, veteran Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams will embark on her third trip to the International Space Station.A NASA announcement states that astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore and veteran Navy test pilot Williams are scheduled to launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from the United Launch Alliance at 10:34 pm EDT on Monday, May 6.
Williams and Wilmore are scheduled to dock with the space station on May 8, and they will return to Earth on May 15 or soon after, assuming all goes according to plan. Assuming all goes according to plan, NASA intends to start operational crew rotation missions with SpaceX on the Starliner in 2025.
After years of delays caused by two unmanned test flights and a slew of technical issues, Williams and Wilmore finally made it to the Kennedy Space Centre on Thursday afternoon to be ready for the first piloted launch of Starliner.
After a trip from Houston's Johnson Space Centre, two of NASA's most experienced astronauts—one with four spaceflights under their belts, the other with eleven spacewalks—and 500 days in orbit between them touched down on the spaceport's three-mile-long runway in T-38 jet trainers.
"How awesome is it that we're finally reaching the point where we're going to leave this planet?" On the runway, Williams spoke with reporters.
“Broaden (NASA’s) capabilities to and from the space station, and that’s extremely important," Wilmore said of the completion of the Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT). "We're thrilled to be in this place."
The fourteenth and fifteenth expedition of Williams' space journey began on December 9, 2006, and ended on June 22, 2007. As Flight Engineer, she was a member of the STS-116 crew that launched. With four spacewalks totaling 29 hours and 17 minutes, she established a new record for women. In June 2007, she made her way back to Earth alongside the STS-117 crew.
From July 14th through November 18th, 2012, she served on Expedition 32/33, her second space trip. Along with Russian Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Flight Engineer Akihiko Hoshide, she lifted out from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14, 2012.
During her four months aboard the laboratory in orbit, she performed research and exploration. With 50 hours and 40 minutes under his belt, Williams reclaimed the record for longest cumulative time spent spacewalking.
To encourage the construction of autonomous spacecraft that can transport passengers to and from the International Space Station, NASA awarded two Commercial Crew Programme contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, with a combined value of $4.2 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively.
After the space shuttle retired, the plan was to start launching Americans back into space on American rockets and spacecraft instead of depending on Russia's Soyuz. After a successful test flight of the Crew Dragon to the space station in May 2020, SpaceX began piloted missions. Two astronauts from NASA were on board.
In the eight operational trips to the lab complex, three commercial visits, and one privately-funded journey to low-Earth orbit that followed, SpaceX launched fifty astronauts, cosmonauts, and civilians into orbit.
In December 2019, Boeing sent its Starliner spacecraft on an unmanned test mission. However, during the journey, the spacecraft encountered serious software and communications issues, which nearly caused the crew ship to crash during an effort to connect with the space station.
Boeing had planned and funded a second unmanned flight, but engineers found rusted valves in the propulsion system within the August 2021 launch window. After that issue was resolved, the second test flight was postponed until May 2022.
Even though the flight was a success, more issues were found, such as parachute malfunctions and concerns about potentially combustible protective tape wrapped around internal wiring. The Crew Flight Test was postponed until May 6th because to the need to address those issues and accommodate a visit within the intricate flight schedule of the space station.
