CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Boeing launched astronauts for the first time on Wednesday, with Suni Williams, an Indian-American, as part of the crew. Williams, a former Navy helicopter pilot with a record of flying various rotary aircraft, including missions during the Gulf War and disaster relief operations, blasted off with Butch Wilmore aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule for the International Space Station, the first to fly the new spacecraft.
Williams and Wilmore will spend just over a week at the orbiting lab before climbing back into Starliner for a remote desert touchdown in the western U.S. on June 14.
“Let’s get going!” Wilmore called out a few minutes before liftoff.
Half an hour later, he and Williams were safely in orbit and giving chase to the space station. Back at Cape Canaveral, the relieved launch controllers stood and applauded. After all the trouble leading up to Wednesday’s launch, including two scrapped countdowns, everything went smoothly before and during liftoff, prompting congratulations from SpaceX’s Elon Musk and others.
“Today it all lined up,” said Boeing program manager Mark Nappi.
Years late because of spacecraft flaws, Starliner’s crew debut comes as the company struggles with unrelated safety issues on its airplane side.
Wilmore and Williams stressed repeatedly before the launch that they had full confidence in Boeing’s ability to get it right with this test flight. Crippled by bad software, Starliner’s initial test flight in 2019 without a crew had to be repeated before NASA would let its astronauts strap in. The 2022 do-over went much better, but parachute problems later cropped up and flammable tape had to be removed from the capsule.