NASA Discovers Temporary Rogue Planet And Hunt Is On For More – Hot Hardware Achi-News

This wasn’t just another trip for a pair of veteran NASA astronauts who arrived at the Space Coast before their flight aboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner.

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, who both joined NASA’s astronaut corps more than two decades ago, will be the commander and pilot for the spacecraft’s long-delayed Crew Test Flight mission.

It is expected to launch with humans on board for the first time on an Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 6 at 10:34 pm, bound for the International Space Station.

The pair flew into KSC in their T-38 jet, landing at the former space shuttle landing facility on Thursday afternoon and speaking to reporters before the mission advance.

“This mission going away well? Of course we want him to do that,” said Wilmore from the tarmac. “Do we expect it to go perfectly? This is the first human flight of the spacecraft. I’m sure we’ll figure things out. That is why we are doing this. This is a test ride. When you do a test, you expect to find things. And we expect to find things. “

Wilmore, who was part of NASA’s astronaut class of 2000, was the pilot for STS-129 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis for an 11-day journey in 2009 and then stayed aboard the ISS for nearly five months between 2014 and 2015. Williams was part of NASA’s astronaut class of 1998 and had two long-term stays aboard the ISS, flying for the first time in 2006 on Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-116 and flying home on Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-117 in 2007 on after 192 days in space. He then flew on Soyuz in 2012 for a four month stay on board.

This is the third trip to space for both, but the pair are not resting on their laurels with 11 days to go before launch. Wilmore said the next few days could be summed up in three words.

“Revision, revision, and revision – everything we’ve been working on. There is so much to this, there is a lot of responsibility, obviously, that we have,” he said. “We’re ready. But we want to stay ready. We have a week to continue to make sure that there is not one event that we have prepared for that we are not prepared for.”

This marks just the sixth new US spacecraft to carry humans following Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the space shuttle and the latest contender, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Dragon’s first human spaceflight came almost four years ago, launching on May 30, 2020, with its own pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

Williams said she got a pep talk from Behnken.

“I got a text from Bob last night, and he was really pumped that we were coming down here. It was like, “I’m reliving it in my mind where we were,’” he said. “He’s giving us his best and is ready for us to fly.”

SpaceX and Boeing had been running fairly close in terms of development at the end of the last decade as one of the two NASA companies awarded contracts for them under its Commercial Crew Program. The program aimed to replace flights from the United States after the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011, which forced to rely on Russia for flights to the ISS aboard the Soyuz spacecraft.

However, Starliner ran into trouble on its first unmanned test flight in December 2019 and was unable to resolve with the ISS, forcing a major overhaul of Boeing’s program including hardware, software and control changes. That led to a successful repeat of that unmanned test flight in 2022, but further hardware delays have now taken place so next month’s planned launch will be more than four years behind schedule.

Since then, SpaceX has gone full steam ahead, having flown 50 people into space on its fleet of four Crew Dragon spacecraft on 13 missions, and has three more on schedule to fly before the end of the year .

Wilmore said Starliner has taken longer, but it’s time.

“We’ve had a bit of a delay because we weren’t ready,” he said. “There are literally 1,000 events going on at the same time as you step up and prepare to launch and during the launch sequence, and then the spacecraft itself when we’re in orbit.”

But it is certain that all the parts are in place.

“There is so much going on. It is not easy. I think we make it look easy. That’s our goal,” he said. “We want the public to think it’s easy, but it’s not. It is very difficult. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t ready. We are ready. The spaceship is ready. And the teams are ready.”

Boeing’s CFT mission is now aiming for an eight-day stay aboard the ISS. Its crew’s main goals are to test standby docking systems on approach and landing operations when it returns to Earth, which will include a parachute-assisted assault in the western US, unlike the watery spills off the coast of Florida taken from SpaceX’s. Dragon Crew.

If successful, it prepares Boeing to begin operational missions to the ISS as early as February 2025. That first mission, dubbed Starliner-1, already has three of its four crew members deployed. name

Boeing is contracted for a six-crew orbital mission through the end of the ISS operation as early as 2030. SpaceX and Boeing would transition to sharing one mission each year for NASA until the ISS is decommissioned.

For her part, Williams pumped up Starliner’s role in NASA’s current program, as well as her role with NASA’s Artemis program’s future missions on the Orion spacecraft.

“It has a lot of the same things that Orion has,” he said. “So I think if I was a young astronaut, and I was thinking about going to the moon, I think I would put my hand up and say I want to fly a Starliner.”

2024 Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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