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Astronaut visits ULA’s facilities and shows off their wonky elevator floors

NASA Astronaut Matthew Dominick visited ULA’s SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to check out Starliner and shared an interesting photo of the VIF’s floors.

Earlier this month Boeing’s Starliner was moved to United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vertical Integration Facility (VIF). There it was mated to its Atlas V rocket that was assembled in the same building. The VIF houses and protects the rocket while ULA teams finish prepping it for launch. Closer to launch, the Mobile Launch Platform will move the Atlas V, with Starliner on top, to the launch pad for final checkouts.

One of the curious things that Dominick shared was images of the elevator floor numbers for ULA’s VIF. The floors aren’t set up like your normal office building but are laid out where teams need to access the rocket. The floors tend to skip numbers and add in several “.3” or “.6” to the end of floor numbers.

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Boeing’s Starliner is expected to launch on July 30th. Boeing is currently working through their Launch Readiness Review with NASA. The LRR goes over every part of the process of launching the capsule to the ISS. If anything shows up that needs fixing it must be resolved before the LRR team gives the go for the launch of OFT-2. Orbital Flight Test 2 will be the second attempt to get Starliner to the ISS after the first attempt in December of 2019 failed to reach it.

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Avatar for Seth Kurkowski Seth Kurkowski

Seth Kurkowski covers launches and general space news for Space Explored. He has been following launches from Florida since 2018.