The capsule is scheduled to depart the space station on Wednesday for a return-flight to Earth, ending with a airbag-softened parachute landing in the New Mexico desert.
A success is seen as pivotal to Boeing as the Chicago-based company scrambles to climb out of successive crises in its jetliner business and its space defense unit. The Starliner programne alone has cost nearly US$600 million in engineering setbacks since the 2019 mishap.
If all goes well with the current mission, Starliner could fly its first team of astronauts to the space station as early as the fall.
For now, the only passenger was a research dummy, whimsically named Rosie the Rocketeer and dressed in a blue flight suit, strapped into the commander’s seat collecting data on crew cabin conditions during the journey, plus 363kg of cargo to deliver to the space station.
The orbital platform is currently occupied by a crew of three NASA astronauts, a European Space Agency astronaut from Italy and three Russian cosmonauts.
Since resuming crewed flights to orbit from American soil in 2020, nine years after the space shuttle programme ended, the US space agency has had to rely solely on the Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to fly NASA astronauts.
Previously the only other option for reaching the orbital laboratory was by hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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