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Launch day is finally here: Boeing's Starliner capsule blasts off Monday to the International Space Station on its first crewed mission – several years after SpaceX first achieved the same milestone.
Starliner will be propelled into orbit by an Atlas V rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture. A successful mission would help dispel the bitter taste left by the numerous setbacks in the Starliner program. It had hoped to carry out that flight in 2022, but problems kept cropping up, notably in the parachute system used to slow the craft when it returns to Earth's atmosphere.
"We certainly have some unknowns in this mission, things we expect to learn, being a test mission. We may encounter things we don't expect," Free said, noting that Starliner is just the sixth US-built class of vessel for NASA astronauts.
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