Watch Boeing’s Starliner arrive at ISS today on historic 1st astronaut mission (Image Credit: Space.com)
Boeing’s Starliner capsule will reach the International Space Station today (June 6) on its first-ever crewed mission, and you can watch the action live.
Starliner is expected to dock with the orbiting lab today around 12:15 p.m. EDT (1615 GMT) on its historic astronaut debut, which is known as Crew Flight Test (CFT).
You can watch the rendezvous live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT).
Related: Boeing Starliner’s 1st astronaut mission: Live updates
NASA’s coverage will continue through several more CFT milestones today, including hatch opening (expected around 2:00 p.m. EDT, or 1800 GMT) and welcoming remarks from astronauts already on board the station (around 2:20 p.m. EDT, or 1820 GMT).
NASA will also webcast a post-docking press conference happening at Johnson Space Center in Houston today at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT).
CFT launched yesterday (June 5), sending NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly week-long stay. If all goes according to plan on CFT, Starliner will be certified to fly operational, long-duration crewed missions to and from the orbiting lab for NASA.
SpaceX already does this for the agency with its Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. Elon Musk’s company is in the middle of its eighth contracted astronaut mission to the ISS for NASA, which is known as Crew-8.
CFT was originally supposed to launch on May 6, but that try was scrubbed about two hours before liftoff when team members noticed a misbehaving valve in the upper stage of Starliner’s United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket.
ULA decided to replace the valve, pushing the target launch date back to May 17. The timeline shifted further to the right after a helium leak was detected in one of Starliner’s reaction-control thrusters. The launch team ultimately deemed the leak a minor issue and cleared CFT for a June 1 liftoff. That try was aborted just minutes before launch thanks to faulty ground equipment, pushing the next attempt back to June 5.
CFT is the third mission for Starliner, following uncrewed launches toward the ISS in December 2019 and May 2022. That first effort was unsuccessful — Starliner suffered several glitches that prevented it from rendezvousing with the station — but the capsule met up with the orbiting lab on try number two.
