The Boeing Starliner with astronaut Sunita Williams and her crewmate Butch Wilmore safely docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday.
The 59-year-old Indian-origin astronaut became the first woman to pilot and test a new crewed spacecraft on its maiden mission.
Celebrating her arrival at the space station, she did a little happy dance and hugged the seven other astronauts who was there along with her at the ISS.
Hugs all around! The Expedition 71 crew greets Butch Wilmore and @Astro_Suni aboard @Space_Station after #Starliner docked at 1:34 p.m. ET on June 6. pic.twitter.com/wQZAYy2LGH— Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) June 6, 2024
Earlier, Williams carried an idol of Lord Ganesh and the Bhagavad Gita to space and this was her third trip.
As a part of an old tradition in ISS, Ms Williams and Mr Wilmore were welcomed by the ringing of a bell, an NDTV report stated.
While talking about her dance party, Williams said, “That’s the way to get things going.”
She thanked all her crewmembers for “such a great welcome”, while calling them “another family”.
Ms Williams and Mr Willmore are the first crew to fly Starliner and the duo successfully docked the Boeing spacecraft to the ISS, 26 hours after launching from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Wilmore and Williams — retired Navy captains and former space station residents — stressed repeatedly before the launch that they had full confidence in Boeing’s ability to get it right with this test flight. Crippled by bad software, Starliner’s initial test flight in 2019 without a crew had to be repeated before NASA would let its astronauts strap in. The 2022 do-over went much better, but parachute problems later cropped up and flammable tape had to be removed from the capsule.
Boeing was hired alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX a decade ago to ferry NASA’s astronauts to and from the space station. The space agency wanted two competing US companies for the job in the wake of the space shuttles’ retirement, paying $4.2 billion to Boeing and just over half that to SpaceX, which refashioned the capsule it was using to deliver station supplies.
SpaceX launched astronauts into orbit in 2020, becoming the first private business to achieve what only three countries — Russia, the US and China — had mastered. It has taken nine crews to the space station for NASA and three private groups for a Houston company that charters flights.
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