It was a It was a tough few years for Boeing, but now the company is about to fly closer to the sun than ever. After nearly a decade of development and delays, today marks the first crewed launch of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. Here we explain how to watch it live.
The launch is a jointly planned event between Boeing and NASA, and is scheduled for Monday, May 6 at 10:34 pmEDT, 7:34 Pacific Time. You can watch the live stream of the launch in several ways. It will be broadcast on the NASA channel. official website and Youtube channelas well as in NASA+, the agency’s subscription service. If you’re on a mobile device, streaming is also available on the nasa app. You can also see it right here.
The livestream begins approximately four hours before the planned launch time, at 6:30 pm Eastern, 3:30 pm Pacific.
The launch of the Starliner has been a long time coming. With this long-awaited liftoff, Boeing will officially be the second company (after SpaceX) to partner with NASA to take humans to space. The Starliner will be crewed by NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who will head to the International Space Station. The plan is for the astronauts to stay there for about a week, then return to planet Earth, re-enter the atmosphere aboard the same spacecraft, and then land by parachute.
If this mission succeeds without problems, it will probably also be good news for the beleaguered aviation company. Boeing has attracted a lot of presumably unwanted attention in recent months, as a series of technical glitches on its commercial airline flights have terrified travelers and made headlines. These events come shortly after two of Boeing’s 737 Max planes crashed in 2018 and 2019. Clearly, Boeing is eager to regain some public goodwill and write a whole new chapter focused on the future of bringing more people to the space.