Starliner docks at ISS in spite of glitches
Boeing's two-member Starliner crew received a warm welcome aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday after successfully docking, a key test of the new spacecraft's flight-worthiness. 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 had been partially fixed and 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 nearly 27 hours following its launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A live Nasa video feed showed the smiling new arrivals, wearing their blue flight suits, weightlessly floating headfirst through the padded passageway, one after the other, into the station. Williams was first. "We're just as happy as can be to be up in space," she said during a brief welcoming ceremony a short time later. The Starliner autonomously docked with the ISS while both were orbiting some 250 miles over the southern Indian Ocean at 1.34 p.m. EDT, as the two vehicles soared around the globe in tandem at about 17,500 miles per hour. Getting Starliner to this point has been a fraught process for Boeing under its US$4.2 billion, fixed-priced contract with NASA, which wants the redundancy of two different US rides to the ISS.