By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
(Reuters) – Boeing’s new Starliner capsule and its inaugural two-member NASA crew safely docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, meeting a key test in proving the vessel’s flight-worthiness and sharpening Boeing’s competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The rendezvous was achieved despite an earlier loss of several guidance-control jet thrusters, some of them due to a helium propulsion leak, which NASA and Boeing said should not compromise the mission.
The CST-100 Starliner, with veteran astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams aboard, arrived at the orbiting platform after a flight of roughly 26 hours following its launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The reusable gumdrop-shaped capsule, dubbed “Calypso” by its crew, was lofted into space on Wednesday atop an Atlas V rocket furnished and flown by Boeing-Lockheed Martin’s United Launch Alliance joint venture.
It autonomously docked with the ISS while both were orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) over the southern Indian Ocean at 1:34 p.m. EDT (1734 GMT).
The spacecraft’s final approach to the ISS and docking, following a brief interval when Wilmore manually controlled the capsule, was shown on a NASA webcast.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham and Jonathan Oatis)
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