that s never happened before she s done seven spacewalks. that s the second most log that the second most amount of cumulative spacewalk time of any female astronaut. and the first to finish a triathlon in space. the two of them have really bonded over. their many years in training. and i should just note alison, that they have been waiting for years to fly this thing. i mean, nasa first selected boeing and spacex to fly these commercial crew missions to the iss back in 2014, sonny was assigned in 2015, so that s how long she has been waiting for this mission. that s an incredible context. there, kristen. so charles, just help just so i understand the difference between a test flight and a spaceflight is that no one has ever gone into space on this rocket before. so they need to make sure that this particular rocket gets them to the international space station. is that right that s not exactly
way. but the scrub back in may wasn t their fault. and this one might not be too. we just don t know yet. also really important, important to point out here, allison, that scrubs are really common in spaceflight. they happen all the time. the current nasa administrator, bill nelson s his mission to space back on a space shuttle it s scrubbed four or five times, and that wasn t even a test flight. so these things happen and there s especially an added layer of scrutiny around a first crewed test flight like this one. and the us play they even said that that first ghraieb back in may if there hadn t been a crew on board, if they had just been setting analytes and payloads onboard like they normally fly they would have already been orbit, but because they were dealing with people on board instead of payloads and satellites they were taking extra precautions so that may be what happened here, but we re now getting official confirmation that they are
nasa s golden prime contract tractor for so many years during the shuttle program, was going to beat spacex s crew dragon to flying astronauts to the international space station. so many nasa astronauts back then wanted to be assigned the boeing missions, not spacex, that clearly turned out to be dead wrong. i mean, since then, spacex s flown 13 crewed missions to the international space hey, station, boeing starliner, still has yet to get off the ground. so yes not what boeing wanted, but this could not be a boeing issue, right? i mean, the rocket itself that propels the boeing starliner spacecraft into space is designed by a different company, the united launch alliance. and that first scrub back in may was caused by an issue with the rocket, not boeing s starliner spacecraft. so yes it s a setback for boeing, but it s also potentially not even boeing s fault here. now granted, they ve had tons of technical and other issues and engineering problems along the
so rare. there have only been six in us history, mercury gemini apollo, the space shuttle spacex crew, dragon bagging, and now boeing starliner. so to be one of the two astronauts selected for this mission is a huge honore. nasa only selects it s top astronauts for this hi is it is so risky, it is so dangerous, no humans have ever been inside of this spacecraft as it goes all the way up into outer space for this mission, they selected the commander, butch wilmore he s a navy test pilot, been a nasa astronauts since 2000, logged 178 days space force spacewalks from tennessee, just an all-around really nice guy. he s also a pastor at his local church. and then the pilot but is sunny williams. she s also a navy test pilot selected as an astronaut and 98 she was she is she is about to become in just a few minutes now the first one woman on a crude crewed test flight,
will that the propellant for this vehicle go they boil off and you want to make sure that the tanks are full, so they continue to replenish right up until just before liftoff. so they wanted to make sure that everything was stable and you may have heard, if you were listening, we had someone listening to the nasa net they were just trying to make sure that all the systems were staying people that everything was okay, and that there was nothing that they had to worry about or what take care of right away they re always hoping that there may be something very minor that we could clear as kristen said, it s an instantaneous launch, but we ve all seen cases where okay. we re a few seconds behind the space behind the international space station. but we can make up that time and distance so they want to make sure that they re ready to go if if all of a sudden something it turns out to be really minor and they can reset that, can can pick up the countdown. but when they cycled back to t min