“You leave nothing to chance”: astronauts prepare for the arrival of Boeing’s Starliner to the space station

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are preparing to welcome Boeing’s first crewed space flight.

The mission, known as Crew Flight Test, will launch next Monday.

Aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule will be NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will spend about 10 days on the space station.

SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, Matthew Dominick and Alexander Grebenkin will oversee the arrival of the new rocket commissioned by NASA.

“The arrival of a completely new vehicle, the first manned flight of a new generation spacecraft, is something really important. You leave nothing to chance,” Barratt said.

Barratt said the crew would go over every detail of the rendezvous approach, docking and “every little corner of possibilities that we need to look at.”

“Basically the same procedures and precautions we would take with any vehicle, except the excitement is heightened a little because it’s a new vehicle,” Barratt added.

The crew has already relocated its Dragon capsule, Endeavor, to make room for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.

Endeavor undocked from the forward port of the station’s Harmony module, where the new Starliner capsule will land, and then docked autonomously to the Harmony spaceport on Thursday.

NASA previously relocated crewed Dragon capsules for the Crew-1, Crew-2 and Crew-6 missions, the agency wrote in a advertisement.

Crew-8 is the eighth manned operational mission that SpaceX has conducted for NASA. They arrived at the ISS in March and will remain until September.

‘Stunning’ views from the ISS

Jeanette Epps says she has been amazed by floating in the space station and the “stunning” views of Earth.

“There’s so many things that captivated me… Just the feeling of being weightless in space, this whole feeling,” Epps said.

“But the most important thing for me was to see the planet from this point of view. It’s absolutely stunning, and its beauty, its position in space, the darkness around it, all of it makes you gasp and say, wow, that’s our home and there’s nothing nearby. Therefore, we really have to take care of our planet,” he added.

Epps, a former Ford Motor engineer and CIA technical intelligence officer, is the second Black woman assigned to an extended assignment at the station.

Before the flight she said she is especially proud to be a role model for black girls, showing that spaceflight “is an option for them, that it’s not just for other people.”

Barratt, a 65-year-old doctor on his third mission, is the oldest full-time astronaut to fly in space. He says that he has adapted more quickly during the current mission.

“Even though there was an 11 or 12 year gap between the flights, how much of that is cognitive strategies versus what the body innately remembers?” Barrat said.

“That’s up for debate, I’m not sure, but I got very comfortable very quickly up here, just handling the fluid shifting and some of the other shifting and being able to navigate in three dimensions and handle things without losing things,” he added.

“So, I would say whatever age factor played, I adapted more quickly since this is my third spaceflight.”

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Video editor • Roselyne Min