by Update, 9pm EDT: The Boeing Starliner launch has been scrambled due to a valve issue on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. This is the link to our scrub story.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – When the Boeing Starliner capsule carries two astronauts to space tonight (May 6), at least 100 people in Mission Control will be on hand for support and guidance.
Tonight’s mission, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), is the first-ever crew launch for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. CFT will launch NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station (ISS) at 10:34 pm (0234 GMT Tuesday, May 7) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here. You can watch it live here at Space.com, via NASA Television.
But the action isn’t all in Florida: Boeing and NASA are teaming up at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to launch this crew into space, marking the first time since the space shuttle era that a crewed spacecraft has been carried. ruling from Houston.
Starliner’s massive support group includes Teresa Kinney, the first female chief engineer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Space Coast. Kinney will sit as a backup at Mission Control as an advisor to other engineers. Although he is talented, some of the main controllers “jumped late” compared to Kinney, she told Space.com. “So if you had a problem that they didn’t see, or maybe some testing that they didn’t involve, hopefully I’ll be able to provide that continuity,” she said.
Related: I flew the Boeing Starliner spacecraft in 4 different simulators. Here’s what I learned (video, photos)
Kinney has worked with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program for many years, primarily on the Starliner side; in fact, she has been on commercial crew since the days of the constellation program. It was a Bush-era proposal from the early 2000s, later withdrawn, that aimed to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars.
Kinney said his role evolved as the Commercial Crew Program did, as the hardware matured and testing continued. Contracts were first awarded in 2010, and both SpaceX and Boeing were selected in 2014 as the first commercial crew vendors to send astronauts into space.
“You don’t know what you don’t know when you start developing hardware and doing tests and stuff,” Kinney told Space.com at KSC. “When I was starting out, we were setting up verifications and asking, ‘What is this thing going to look like? How are we going to do tests and analysis?’ “
Models were complex, as multiple parties were involved, including Boeing, NASA and United Launch Alliance (which is launching CFT with its Atlas V rocket). And both SpaceX and Boeing have experienced technical issues with their programs — related to parachute systems, for example — that needed to be addressed as their spacecraft evolved.
Starliner, Kinney acknowledged, has had to deal with more issues than SpaceX’s Dragon: The first Starliner flight to the ISS failed to reach its destination in 2019 due to software glitches, though the uncrewed attempt came follow up in 2022 there after the arrangements are implemented. New issues were found in 2023 that further pushed CFT back, including the parachutes and flammable tape found wrapped around capsule wiring.
“The vehicle was actually a good design, but the problem is that it was a paper design,” Kinney said. She said SpaceX had a lead on its Crew Dragon spacecraft, as the company had already flown a Dragon cargo variant on robotic replacement missions to the ISS before its first crewed test flight in 2020. SpaceX has sent 11 more crews to ISS since then.
In contrast, Boeing was “literally doing something new” with Starliner, she said. The company was working to leverage what it knew from past programs; Boeing was the prime contractor for the ISS, for example, and also builds the core stage for NASA’s Space Launch System mega-rocket, which launched the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission into lunar orbit in late 2022.
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But new lessons had to be learned as Starliner took its first steps in space. Kinney said the questions that came up there are similar to the ones she’s faced in other programs: “You’re going, ‘Well, what do I need to change? What should I change?’ And that was a lot of what they were doing.”
Kinney cautioned that she can’t speak for everyone in Mission Control, but those she spoke to are “excited” to see CFT get off the ground. The teams are “scrubbing through all their systems” to be ready for important pre-lift flight review milestones, and continue to conduct preparations and simulations to get the astronauts safely off the ground.
“I love it when you work with a team that is so focused on the right things,” Kinney said. “There are no shrinking violets in the group as far as safety and things. So I think it will be as good as we can do it.”
