How to watch Boeing’s Starliner fly its first astronauts to the International Space Station

After years of delays, Boeing will finally launch Starliner, its CST-100 spacecraft, in its first crewed test flight on Monday, May 6. The crew vehicle will ferry astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station (ISS) for about a week.



Liftoff is currently scheduled for 10:34 p.m. ET from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA will stream the launch live, and you can catch it on NASA TV and the agency’s YouTube channel . Coverage is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. ET.



If the Boeing CFT (crewed flight test) is successful, and the vehicle is certified for flight, NASA will have two different crew vehicles to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. The second vehicle is SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which was certified in 2020 and just had its eighth operational flight in March as part of the Commercial Crew program. (SpaceX has also conducted private flights, including Inspiration 4 and the Axiom missions, with Crew Dragon.)



In 2014, NASA signed contracts with both Boeing and SpaceX to provide astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station as part of the Commercial Crew program. But Boeing’s road to this crewed flight test has been bumpy. It was originally scheduled for early 2017, but various problems—from issues with the parachutes to flammable tape lining the inside of the capsule to problems with stuck valves —have delayed the test until now.



If all goes well today, the first operational flight of Starliner would likely be later this year or early in 2025. Boeing is contracted for six total crewed flights to the ISS over the next few years. And between the widely publicized problems on the company’s airline side, as well as the fact that it’s lost at least $1.5 billion already on Starliner (and hasn’t even flown a crew yet), Boeing really needs this flight to go smoothly.