Launch of the first manned Starliner ship

The crewed Starliner ship is scheduled to take off at 12:25 p.m. (6:25 p.m. in Poland) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Two NASA astronauts – Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams – are scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday and stay there for about a week. Their goal is to test the Starliner spacecraft and its subsystems before NASA begins work on a transportation system for periodic missions.

The first Starliner launch in 2019, without a crew, ended in failure because the capsule entered the wrong orbit and did not reach the International Space Station; The trip had to be repeated. A series of other technical errors were later discovered. Ten years ago, NASA commissioned Elon Musk’s private companies, Boeing and SpaceX, to develop and produce a vehicle to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Unlike Boeing, SpaceX’s Dragon ships have been successfully conducting orbital flights since 2020.