After days of delays and probably maybe more than a little apprehension on the part of the two astronauts who might’ve read up on some of the recent engineering issue’s with the company’s products, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Wednesday, per NASA.
“We have liftoff! The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, carrying Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft and NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, commander, and Suni Williams, pilot, are on a course to the International Space Station. The crew is on a roughly 25.5-hour journey with rendezvous and docking expected at 12:15 pm EDT, Thursday, June 6. The crew flight test mission makes history in several ways. As the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, Williams is the first female astronaut to fly on the first flight of a crewed spacecraft,” wrote NASA’s media team in the update.
We have no sources indicating that a Boeing engineer put back in drafts an email to Reuters and other major media outlets linked to a Dropbox with 1.7 TB of internal communications about major safety defects in the Starliner’s design, removed the clip from his 9mm and placed it back in a drawer with the pistol while leaving out on the desk the bottle of bourbon he needed to keep his trigger hand steady. But painting that picture was a good way to fill space, and the astronauts still have about 25 hours to go before they can dock with the space station. A lot can happen.