Best wishes for Sunita Williams and Butch Willmore
This is a serious human space mission that has been slow in proving and called a Crew Flight Test also indicates more than normal risks as the astronauts are being asked to do failure simulation tasks.
Our motto during Apollo Missions was "fail, fail, failsafe” meaning if Primary System Fails, and if Secondary System Fails then the Tertiary System should Fail only in a SAFE mode.
Since I have not studied the ULA history of testing and especially with this first combination of Human rating of Centaur, Delta and Starliner with May 6 launch is the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. The Spacecraft with astronauts itself is being flown for the first time!
I have lived through Apollo, Skylab, Space Station and Space Shuttle era of human Space missions and having participated and tracked and modified future missions and in Analyses of Apollo 13 mission in real-time and in providing NASA comments on Columbia within 24 Hours of the mishap, I am hoping all to be open and communicative to ensure full ascent to ISS and also during first descent to Earth on land, a first for NASA.
Yes Boeing history goes on from Apollo to date and it is one of two Aircraft producers worldwide that keeps us safe in the skies, yet this time there is a long gap in their crewed flights and we wish them a pathbreaking success.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)
NASA Apollo Achievement Award
ISRO Distinguished Service Awards
Former MTS NASA HQ MSEB Apollo
Former Scientific Secretary ISRO HQ
Ontolog Board of Trustees
Particle and Space Physics
Senior Enterprise Architect
SAE Fuel Cell Tech Committee voting member for 20 years.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drravisharma
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