I've had Monday night blocked off on my calendar since sometime last week, and it's not for anything sensible like a dentist appointment or a friend's birthday. It's for a rocket.
Boeing's Starliner capsule is supposed to launch its first crewed test flight on Monday, May 6th, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams up to the ISS. It's going up on a ULA Atlas V out of Cape Canaveral, and if the mission clock in my head is right, liftoff is somewhere around 10:30 at night Eastern, which means I'll be watching this thing from my couch with a bag of pretzels instead of asleep like a normal adult with a job.
I've been a launch-watcher since I was a kid staying up for Shuttle missions on a fuzzy cable feed, so this isn't some new hobby I picked up. But I'll admit part of why this one's got my attention is that it's Boeing, and I don't currently trust Boeing to reliably screw a door panel on straight, let alone put two people on top of a rocket. That's not a cheap shot, either, after the Alaska Airlines door plug thing back in January grounded a chunk of the Max 9 fleet, "Boeing" and "I'll believe it when I see it" have basically become synonyms for me. So yes, I'm rooting for it. I'm also going to have one eye on the abort-scenario section of the NASA broadcast the whole time, because that's apparently who I am now.
Worth remembering too that this isn't Boeing's first swing at this. There was an uncrewed test back in 2019 that went sideways almost immediately, a software issue put the capsule in the wrong orbit and they had to scrub the ISS docking entirely. A second uncrewed attempt in 2022 actually worked fine. So Monday is attempt number three, first time with actual humans strapped in, and something like four years after SpaceX's Crew Dragon started doing this same job without much drama. That gap is kind of the whole story here, honestly. Two companies got the same NASA Commercial Crew contract back in 2014, and one of them has been flying astronauts routinely since 2020 while the other is just now getting to the starting line.
None of which is a knock on the astronauts, obviously. Wilmore and Williams have both been up before, Williams has logged something like 300-plus days in space across two prior stints, if I remember right, so if anyone's earned the right to be strapped into a first-flight capsule it's them.
Small complaint while I'm here: there is no good way to add "watch NASA TV at 10:34pm" to a phone calendar that also reminds you an hour early with a countdown. I ended up just setting three separate alarms like it's 2009 and I'm timing a bus with a stopwatch. Somebody build that app already. I would pay actual money for a launch-tracker widget that just sits on my home screen and doesn't need me to open six tabs of a livestream fifteen minutes early to make sure the feed didn't die again.
Anyway. If it goes up Monday and docks clean, that's a real milestone, first time Boeing's flown people commercially to the station, and NASA finally gets the two-provider redundancy it's wanted since the Shuttle retired and left the US paying Russia for Soyuz seats for the better part of a decade. If it slips again, which given the program's history feels like at least a coin flip, I'll just reset the alarms and try again whenever the next window opens.
Either way I'm not doing anything productive Monday night. Figured I'd say that part out loud before it happens instead of pretending it snuck up on me.