Boeing Starliner astronauts make first official visit to Kennedy Space Center

Emre Kelly
Florida Today
Astronauts Chris Ferguson, Eric Boe, Josh Cassada, Nicole Mann and Suni Williams stand for pictures in the Boeing Starliner manufacturing facility at Kennedy Space Center.

Boeing Starliner astronauts Eric Boe, Josh Cassada, Chris Ferguson, Nicole Mann and Suni Williams will soon see many firsts: the first test flight of their spacecraft, the first crewed missions and, for two, their first time in space.

Their visit to Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, while not as monumental, was still the first time the quintet came as a team to Boeing's Starliner manufacturing facility, also known as the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility, or C3PF. NASA last week announced crew assignments for upcoming Boeing and SpaceX flights to the International Space Station.

"This building has a lot of significance as it applies to human spaceflight," three-time space shuttle astronaut Chris Ferguson told reporters at Boeing's facility, which was once one of three designed to process the orbiters. "In a year or so, we're going to send humans back up to low Earth orbit from the Cape Canaveral area."

While there, the astronauts met employees tasked with building and testing their CST-100 Starliners, hopped inside to get a feel for the hardware and spoke with officials on their missions, to name a few. United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket will boost their missions from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41, which they also toured on Thursday – including the hundreds of steps required to reach the top of the launch tower.

Boe, Ferguson and Mann will be the first to fly on a Starliner sometime in mid-2019, the spacecraft for which is referred to as "Starliner Two." There are a total of three Starliners in the C3PF, one of which is strictly for Earth-based testing. Boe is a former shuttle astronaut and it will mark Mann's first time in space.

Cassada and Williams, meanwhile, will fly on a long-duration – possibly up to six months – flight to the ISS on "Starliner Three," but that spacecraft must first launch on an uncrewed test flight sometime in late 2018 or early 2019. Following that, it will be refurbished for the duo's mission.

Cassada, a first-time astronaut, is hoping to glean as much as he can from Williams, who flew to the ISS on two shuttle missions and spent nearly 51 hours on spacewalks.

"Suni is really helpful to me as a rookie," Cassada said. "We've gotten to fly together and work together in the pool quite a bit, and for me it's a real treat to be able to fly in space with her."

All five are military aviators.

Seeing astronauts standing next to their spacecraft is a visual milestone for the Space Coast, which hasn't hosted a crewed launch since the final shuttle mission more than seven years ago.

"Just bringing regular launches back to Florida is pretty cool," Williams said. "Being able to have our friends and family just drive here to see a launch and people from all over the country watch a launch – that's cool."

Ferguson, who flew on the final shuttle mission and has led Starliner's development as a Boeing employee, has seen KSC transform since the program's end in 2011.

"I would drive down the transfer aisle in and around here and the parking lots were empty," he said. "Now, it's a vibrant facility. The parking lot is full every day."

"I call Kennedy Space Center the wild west of space exploration right now. There's no less than a half a dozen different programs going on."

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook at @EmreKelly.

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