During the first crewed test flight, two astronauts — NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — will fly on Starliner's 10-day Crew Flight Test mission, or CFT, to the . If all goes according to plan, at least three astronauts will venture to the ISS for the operational six-month Starliner-1 flight in 2025., which was certified for flight in 2020. Both SpaceX and Boeing are recipients of NASA Commercial Crew Program funding first announced in 2014.
The spacecraft is designed to carry up to seven astronauts, with additional cargo also possible if fewer astronauts fly during a particular mission.Steve Stich is program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program and is responsible for commercial spacecraft development and certification for U.S. companies to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
As of May 2020, under the CCP, NASA had given SpaceX about $3.1 billion to develop its Crew Dragon spacecraft and Boeing about $4.8 billion to develop Starliner. NASA plans to run the ISS until 2030, if all partners agree, and for transportation, it has allocated 14 crewed missions to SpaceXBoeing had been testing Starliner, preparing for its first crewed flight to space, for many years, even before its first flight, Orbital Flight Test 1 , in 2019.
That said, the capsule did not get to the space station because it did not reach its expected orbit. The capsule's internal clock that helps to control timed events during the launch sequence had an error, so the capsule burned too much fuel to safely dock with the space station. The fully assembled Starliner spacecraft being prepared to fly Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 is lifted inside the Starliner production factory at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Jan. 13, 2021.With 80 corrective actions needing to be addressed following the first test flight, Boeing planned to launch a second uncrewed test flight before it began launching crews to space.