Boeing launched its very first astronauts bound for the International Space Station aboard a Starliner capsule on Wednesday. This joins a \u2018select club\u2019 of spacecraft, carrying humans beyond the planet Earth. The aerospace giant finally found success after its third attempt. Two previous bids to fly with a crew were aborted late into the countdown, owing to technical difficulties. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams \u2014 both of whom have two previous spaceflights under their belts \u2014 blasted off at 10:52am from the \u2018Cape Canaveral Space Force Station\u2019, in Florida. They are expected to spend around one week at the International Space Station. \u201cSuni and I are honoured to share this dream of spaceflight with each and every one of you,\u201d Wilmore, the commander of the test flight, said right before liftoff. \u201cLet\u2019s put some fire in this rocket, and let\u2019s push it to the heavens.\u201d Starliner has become the sixth type of US-built spaceship to fly Nasa astronauts. This follows the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the Space Shuttle from 1981 to 2011 and SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon from 2020. However, the \u2018Starliner\u2019 program has been plagued by years of safety concerns and delays. A successful mission will \u2018likely\u2019 offer Boeing a \u2018much-needed\u2019 reprieve from the intense safety concerns surrounding its passenger jets. Meanwhile, Nasa is looking to certify Boeing as a \u2018second commercial operator\u2019, to ferry crews to the International Space Station. This is something which Elon Musk\u2019s \u2018SpaceX\u2019 has already been doing for the US space agency, for the last four years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Boeing launched its very first astronauts bound for the International Space Station aboard a Starliner capsule on Wednesday. This joins a \u2018select club\u2019 of spacecraft,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17833,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}