Starliner launches first crew to space station

Boeing on Wednesday launched its very first astronauts bound for the International Space Station aboard a Starliner capsule, which joins a select club of spacecraft to carry humans beyond Earth.The third time turned out to be the charm for the aerospace giant, after two previous bids to fly were aborted with the crew strapped in and ready to go.Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both of whom have two previous spaceflights under their belts, blasted off at 10:52am atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.Their Starliner, named "Calypso” after famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s ship, is now chasing the ISS in orbit. It should rendezvous with the research lab at 12:15pm Sunday to begin a roughly one-week stay."Suni and I are honoured to share this dream of spaceflight with each and every one of you,” Wilmore, who is commander of the test flight, said just before liftoff. "Let’s put some fire in this rocket, and let’s push it to the heavens.”Starliner becomes just the sixth type of US-built spaceship to fly Nasa astronauts, following the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes in the 1960s and 1970s, the Space Shuttle from 1981 to 2011, and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon from 2020."This is another milestone in this extraordinary history of Nasa,” the space agency’s chief Bill Nelson told reporters."And I want to give my personal congratulations to the whole team that went through a lot of trial and tribulation. But they had perseverance. And that’s what we do at Nasa, we don’t launch until it’s right.”