Veteran Astronauts Barry Wilmore, Sunita Williams Return To Space In Starliner

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Boeing’s two-member Starliner crew received a warm welcome aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on June 6 after successfully docking, a key test of the new spacecraft’s flight worthiness.The rendezvous was achieved despite an earlier loss of several guidance-control jet thrusters, some of them due to a helium propulsion leak, which NASA and Boeing said had been partially fixed and should not compromise the mission.The CST-100 Starliner, with veteran astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams aboard, arrived at the orbiting platform after a flight of nearly 27 hours following its launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.A live NASA video feed showed the smiling new arrivals, wearing their blue flight suits, weightlessly floating headfirst through the padded passageway, one after the other, into the station. Williams was first.”We’re just as happy as can be to be up in space,” she said during a brief welcoming ceremony a short time later.The Starliner autonomously docked with the ISS while both were orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) over the southern Indian Ocean at 1:34 p.m. EDT (1734 GMT), as the two vehicles soared around the globe in tandem at about 17,500 miles (28,160 km) per hour.Getting Starliner to this point has been a fraught process for Boeing under its $4.2 billion, fixed-priced contract with NASA, which wants the redundancy of two different U.S. rides to the ISS.