Eras end fast at NASA: The moment Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 19, 1972, America’s initial lunar ambitions came to an end. The moment the shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, that was the close of a program that had seen 135 shuttles fly.
But new eras can begin fast too, and one got off to a fiery start Friday morning at 6.36 a.m. EST, when an Atlas V rocket carrying the Boeing Starliner spacecraft blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 41. Per NASA, it was expected to reach orbital insertion at 7:07 a.m., thirty one minutes later. With that, a new age of American crews launching in American spacecraft from American soil at last began.
Sort of. There was no one actually aboard the Starliner when it launched today, unless you count an anthropomorphic dummy named Rosie—after the iconic Rosie the Riveter character from the World War II posters, who encouraged women to enter the workforce while the men fought the war. The Starliner’s Rosie was outfitted with the signature red bandana the original Rosie wore in the posters and, more importantly, with biometric sensors to test how the g-loads, vibrations and other stressors of launch will affect real astronauts.
But Rosie the dummy presages big things. The Starliner is expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday at 8:08 a.m., carrying with it 272 kg (600 lbs) of equipment, food, clothing and holiday gifts for the crew. There is nothing particularly special about an uncrewed cargo ship docking with the station; the ISS could not operate without milk runs from Earth on the average of every other month. However, if everything goes well with this particular Starliner, the next one (currently planned for the first half of 2020) will at very long last carry a crew of three veteran astronauts: Chris Furguson, Sunita Williams and Mike Fincke.
“She’s pretty tough,” Fincke told the AP of the Rosie dummy. She’s going to take the hit for us.”
For all of the hand-shaking and high-fiving from NASA after the launch, there was a bit of a ’bout time exasperation too. It was nearly a decade ago that both Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts to develop crew vehicles that would privatize the business of getting astronauts to and from the space station, freeing NASA up to concentrate on crewed flights to the moon and Mars and, not incidentally, sparing the space agency the expense of paying the Russians the current going rate of $80 million per seat aboard their Soyuz rockets—the only taxi service currently capable of reaching to the ISS. Since 2006, Washington has written nearly $4 billion in travel checks to Russia..
NASA’s spent more money still to free itself from Russia, signing a contract worth $2.6 billion with SpaceX and $4.2 billion with Boeing to build domestic vehicles to take over the job. That seed money was supposed to have the new fleet flying by 2016. You’ll notice that 2016 was quite some time ago, and NASA has been honest about its impatience—at least in the case of SpaceX. In September, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted that Elon Musk’s much-publicized unveiling of his 100-person Starship spacecraft was decidedly premature, given the fact that he had still failed to deliver on his much more modest space station commitments.
“Commercial Crew is years behind schedule,” Bridenstine scolded. “NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It’s time to deliver.” Boeing has kept its head down and has been spared the Administrator’s wrath, and today’s launch should ensure that that good will continues.
In March, SpaceX did pull off the same flight test of its crew-rated vehicle that Boeing is attempting now, which might have prevented Bridenstine from from getting even more snappish. Both companies are pledging to fly crews at long last in 2020—perhaps even in the first or second quarters of the year.
Boeing, of course, must still stick its landing, successfully docking with the space station, spending a week aloft and then returning to Earth on Dec. 28. The plan is to make a parachute landing in the New Mexico desert. SpaceX’s Dragons will stick with water landings.
Today’s Boeing launch was a critical step towards the future of the U.S. space program, but also offered a poignant nod to its past. SpaceX’s hardware is all more or less new stuff—its Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft were designed from the ground up after the company was founded in 2002. Boeing’s Starliner is similarly all-new. But the Atlas V booster that launched it is very much legacy hardware. The last time an Atlas launched from Cape Canaveral carrying a spacecraft capable of supporting an astronaut was on May 15, 1963, when Gordon Cooper lifted off for his then record setting 34-hour Earth-orbital mission.
The modern-day Atlas is vastly more powerful than the 1963 model, even though it carried only Rosie the dummy as opposed to Gordon the astronaut. But if today’s launch is an indication, bigger things will be coming, and America—after an eight year layoff so far—will at last be back in the launch game.
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