This Week in Launch: Boeing’s week is finally here, Starliner CFT

After a long road of delays, technical failures, and two inflight tests, Boeing‘s Starliner is finally at the pad and ready to launch later today. The mission will be a major milestone for Boeing, who is desperate for a win right now, but it might show that the world has moved on from legacy providers.

This week’s launches:

• May 6 (Monday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 6-57 | 2:14 P.M. ET
    • SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
  • ULA | Atlas V N22 | Boeing Starliner CFT | 10:34 P.M. ET
    • SLC-41, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
  • CASC | Long March 6 | Unknown Payload | 11:30 P.M. ET
    • LC-9A, Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China
• May 7 (Tuesday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 6-56 | 12:06 P.M. ET
    • LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 8-2 | 7:48 P.M. PT
    • SLC-4E, Vandenberg Space Force Station, California
• May 8 (Wednesday)
  • CASC | Long March 3B | Unknown Payload | 9:50 P.M. ET
    • LC-2, Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China
• May 12 (Sunday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 6-58 | TBD
    • TBD, Florida

Boeing Starliner is at the pad and ready to fly

Over the weekend ULA rolled its specialized Atlas V rocket out from the vertical integration facility and to SLC-41 to prepare it for launch later tonight. The evening lift off will carry Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams inside, to the International Space Station.

The long time co-awardee of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program was expected to leave SpaceX in the dust. However, various funding shortages (which delayed both companies) and technical delays on the first uncrewed flight test and before the second one, means SpaceX has already flown nine crewed flights to the ISS for NASA.

Boeing is so far delayed that it has even missed out on any extra missions within the ISS’s lifespan, all of those going to SpaceX. However, details on the decommissioning of the ISS after 2030 have yet to be finalized so in theory there could be more flights given to Boeing but that is still unknown.

However, only a few nations have mastered the ability to fly humans into space. Nations, not companies, so the fact that two US companies will hopefully soon be capable of human spaceflight is still impressive and should be celebrated.

SpaceX isn’t to be out done this week

With Boeing most likely taking all the headlines, SpaceX is pushing for a possible four launch week.

Once again, SpaceX will launch a Starlink mission from each of its Falcon 9 launch sites, the first should have already launched by this post’s publication. It’s really had to continue the discussion on Starlinks as it has all been said before. It’s big, and really important to the longevity of SpaceX’s Starship and Martian development programs, so there will be a lot of them.

At this point it’s more newsworthy that SpaceX doesn’t launch in a week or launches something other than Starlink.