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November 4, 2019 12:34 pm

NASA Livestreams a Test of Boeing's 'Starliner' Spacecraft

"You can watch a big test of Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft Monday as NASA pushes to bring crewed spaceflight launches back to U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade," reports CNET:The CST-100 Starliner currently sits on a test stand at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range awaiting a pad abort test scheduled for 6 a.m. PT. The test is designed to ensure that the ship's four abort engines and control thrusters will fire in the case of an emergency on the launch pad, carrying the capsule and astronauts up and away from the potential danger. Put another way, should there be risk of an explosion or something else really bad happening on the launch pad, the abort system being tested Monday is essentially the crew's life raft. During the test, the engines should carry the empty spacecraft about one mile into the air and a mile north of the test stand before parachutes and landing airbags are deployed for a soft touch down. Starliner is one of two new spacecraft that NASA has contracted to begin flying astronauts to the International Space Station as part of its Commercial Crew program. The other is the SpaceX Crew Dragon... All [U.S.] astronauts have been launched to orbit via Soyuz rockets since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, and NASA is particularly eager to bring launches back to the U.S. If Monday's test goes well, we might get to see a Starliner launch carrying humans at some point in the coming months.

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