Houston, June 5th (China News Agency) - On June 5th, local time, Boeing's interstellar aircraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, carrying out its first manned test flight mission.
The live broadcast footage from NASA shows that the interstellar aircraft took off at 10:52 Eastern Time on the 5th, aboard the United States Joint Launch Alliance's "Cosmos 5" carrier rocket, carrying American astronauts Boogie Wilmore and Sunny Williams to the International Space Station. About 15 minutes later, the spacecraft separated from the rocket in its scheduled orbit.
The interstellar aircraft is expected to fly in space for about 25 hours and dock with the International Space Station at 12:15 on the 6th. The astronauts will stay at the space station for about a week to focus on testing the performance of the interstellar airliner.
On May 6th, the Starplane made its first manned test flight attempt. The launch mission was cancelled about two hours before the countdown ended due to a valve problem on the Cosmos God 5 carrier rocket. On June 1st, the manned test flight attempt of the interstellar aircraft was paused around 3 minutes and 50 seconds in the countdown due to a ground system malfunction.
Since the retirement of the US space shuttle in 2011, the country has been vigorously developing commercial manned space operations. Boeing and SpaceX received a manned spacecraft project contract from NASA in 2014 to build the Starplane and Dragon spacecraft, respectively. NASA plans to use these two manned spacecraft to take turns transporting astronauts to the space station.
According to the initial plan, the spacecraft developed by both companies was scheduled to launch a manned flight mission in 2017, but both sides severely delayed the progress. As of now, the "Dragon" spacecraft has carried out manned flight missions multiple times; The development progress of the interstellar aircraft has been delayed multiple times due to technical issues, resulting in losses of over 1 billion US dollars for the company. (End)