Boeing’s manned spacecraft, the ‘CST-100 Starliner’, has successfully combined with the International Space Station.
According to Archyde.com, the Starliner, which will be used in the ‘space taxi’ service that transports astronauts to the space station, succeeded in docking at 8:28 pm local time on the 20th, 26 hours following launch.
This flight of Starliner was conducted unmanned and only a test mannequin was loaded, but it was achieved two years and four months following the first orbital flight test in 2019, which was unsuccessful due to a software problem.
“Today is a big milestone,” said NASA astronaut Bob Hines, in a radio message saying, “The Starliner I saw from the space station is beautiful,” the Associated Press reported.
The Starliner, which successfully entered the target orbit and docked with the space station, will complete its mission in the next six days and land in the desert of New Mexico.
When the manned test flight to be held at the end of this year is completed, the Starliner is expected to become a space taxi between the Earth and the space station together with the already operating manned spaceship ‘Crew Dragon’ of ‘Space X’.
*Image source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
