On May 6, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test to the International Space Station will launch Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore on their third space mission.
At Cape Canaveral, Florida’s Space Launch Complex-41, the astronauts will launch aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft atop an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance. After docking, they will spend roughly a week aboard the orbiting laboratory.
About this mission:
This mission marks the first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft and is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The mission’s goal is to test the spacecraft’s system from launch to landing and back to Earth in the western United States. NASA will start the last steps of approving Starliner and its equipment for crewed space station missions after a successful crewed flight test.
Williams’s previous missions :
Sunita Williams is a veteran of two space missions, Expeditions 14/15 and 32/33, having been chosen by NASA to become an astronaut in 1998.
The duration of Expedition 14/15 was December 9, 2006–June 22, 2007. Flight engineer Williams was a member of the Expedition 14 crew. As a member of the Expedition 15 crew, she completed her tour of duty and returned to Earth with the STS-117 crew, landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
During her time on board, Williams completed four spacewalks in a total of 29 hours and 17 minutes, setting a record for female astronauts. Later, in 2008, astronaut Peggy Whitson broke her record with five spacewalks overall.
As the commander of the International Space Station on Expedition 33 and the flight engineer on Expedition 32, Williams also participated in extended missions.
Williams, along with Malenchenko and Hoshide, launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2012. They spent four months exploring and landed in Kazakhstan in November 2012, performing three spacewalks to replace a power relay component and repair an ammonia leak.
Between her two trips, Williams has been in space for a total of 322 days.
Williams once again held the record for the longest total amount of time a female astronaut spent on a spacewalk—50 hours and 40 minutes—until Whitson, who completed 10 spacewalks, shattered it.