On June 5, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the Boeing Starliner spacecraft was successfully launched from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
It was the first crewed flight of the Starliner, with veteran astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams on board.
The Starliner docked with the International Space Station (ISS) the following day. After extensive checks to verify airtight seals, the hatches were opened and Wilmore and Williams floated into the lab complex to an enthusiastic welcome from the seven resident crew members: cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nicolai Chub and Alexander Grebenkin, along with NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Tracy Dyson.
The Boeing Starliner is a human-grade space capsule designed to take astronauts to and from the ISS. Boeing began work on the capsule in 2014, when it signed a US$4.2 billion contract with NASA under the agency’s commercial crew programme.
The ISS is a large space station assembled and maintained in low earth orbit by the collaborative efforts of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (US), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). The ISS is the largest space station ever built.
The ISS programme brings together international flight crews, multiple launch vehicles, globally distributed launch and flight operations, training, engineering, development facilities, communications networks and the international scientific research community.
The space station was officially approved by president Ronald Reagan and a budget approved by the US Congress in 1984. NASA administrator James Beggs immediately set out to find international partners who would co-operate on the programme. Canadians, Japanese and many nations of the European Space Agency began to participate soon after.
In 1993, during a redesign of the ISS, the Russians were invited to participate.
As the ISS is a multi-national collaborative project, the components for in-orbit assembly were manufactured in various countries around the world. In the mid-1990s, the US components Destiny, Unity, the Integrated Truss Structure and the solar arrays were fabricated at the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama and the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. These modules were delivered to the operations and checkout building and the space station processing facility (SSPF) for final assembly and processing for launch.
The Russian modules, including Zarya and Zvezda, were manufactured at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Centre in Moscow. Zvezda was initially manufactured in 1985 as a component for Mir-2, but Mir 2 was never launched and instead became the ISS Service Module.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Columbus module was manufactured at the EADS Astrium space transportation facilities in Bremen, Germany, and by many other contractors throughout Europe. The other ESA-built modules – Harmony, Tranquility, Leonardo and the Cupola – were initially
