‘Where the rubber meets the road’: Starliner test flight crew arrives at Kennedy Space Center

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner Spacecraft is a go for launch.

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Teams wrapped up a flight test readiness review Thursday afternoon as the Starliner’s crew arrived.

NASA Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore touched down at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday in their T-38 Jet, ahead of the first crewed flight test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner Spacecraft.

“This is where the rubber meets the road, where we are going to leave this planet,” Williams said of the upcoming launch. “That is pretty darn cool.”

The Starliner is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas-5 rocket on Monday, May 6, at 10:34 p.m.

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Along the way, NASA and Boeing’s teams have resolved a number of technical issues, including removing miles of tape that posed a potential flammability risk and modifications to the parachute system.

“This is human spaceflight,” Wilmore said at their introduction. “That adage you’ve heard since Apollo-13, ‘failure is not an option,’- and that has nothing specifically to do with Boeing or this program- that’s all things we do in human spaceflight.”

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Williams and Wilmore will spend about a week docked at the International Space Station, demonstrating the Starliner’s end-to-end capabilities before a parachute-assisted landing over White Sands, New Mexico.

“Do we expect it to go perfectly? This is the first human flight of this spacecraft. I’m sure we’ll find things out,” Wilmore said. “That’s why we do this. This is a test flight.”

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Following a successful flight test with astronauts, NASA will begin the final process of certifying the Boeing Starliner to join SpaceX for regular crew rotation flights as part of the agency’s commercial crew program.

Wilmore and Williams will remain in quarantine inside the crew quarters until their launch.

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