CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Boeing has spent more than $1.5 billion to develop its CST-100 Starliner amid years of delays, but the payoff on its deal with NASA is on the horizon with the first human test flight set for launch Monday night.

Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will climb aboard the capsule for the Crew Flight Test atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. It’s set to lift off from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41 at 10:34 p.m. to the International Space Station.

The duo will return after eight days with a landing in the Western United States. The pair will test docking, undocking and landing procedures, including manual takeovers for what would normally be automated systems.

“The success of this mission has always been very important for us as a program for a lot of reasons,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager during a launch readiness review last week. “Number one, we have humans flying on this vehicle. We always take that so seriously — human spaceflight. … Second is, this is an important capability for NASA, and so you know we signed up to go do this, and we’re going to go do it and be successful at it.”

ULA rolled the Atlas V to the pad Saturday morning from the Vertical Integration Facility amid clear blue skies with a forecast for Monday that expects a 95% chance for good weather. The first ever Atlas launch flew John Glenn to space in 1962 and this will mark the 100th Atlas rocket launch.

It’s also the first time since Apollo 7 in 1968 that humans will launch from the Canaveral launch pads with subsequent Apollo, space shuttle and SpaceX Crew Dragon flights all coming from neighboring Kennedy Space Center’s two launch pads.

But Boeing’s road to human spaceflight has been tortuous since NASA awarded the company alongside SpaceX the Commercial Crew Program contracts in 2014 to provide U.S.-based launches for its astronauts to the ISS. The goal was to stop reliance on Russia’s Soyuz flights, NASA’s only option after the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

“The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free. “I don’t want to get too far ahead since we’ll still need to fly a successful mission, but when we do, and when we certify Starliner, the United States will have two unique human space transportations that provide critical redundancy for the ISS access.”

Boeing was in some ways deemed the safer bet by NASA under which it could earn up to $4.2 billion of the contract compared with SpaceX’s initial $2.6 billion. Each company was required to perform one successful uncrewed test flight to the ISS followed by a crewed flight, after which the spacecraft could be certified for use on up to six missions each under the initial contract.

Both companies faced development hurdles that pushed their first crewed test flights to 2019, but that’s when SpaceX surged forward while Boeing lagged behind.

Boeing’s first attempt at the uncrewed flight was not able to rendezvous with the ISS. Although it landed safely, NASA deemed it a “high visibility close call” that forced a major overhaul of the program, including hardware, software and management practices from both Boeing and NASA.

That forced Boeing to absorb the costs for a second try, which it wasn’t able to complete for more than two-and-a-half years, finally launching in May 2022.

Post-flight analysis led to the discovery of further hardware problems and more delays, pushing the crewed flight even farther out. So now it’s running nearly four years behind the pace of SpaceX, which has since flown its fleet of Crew Dragon spacecraft 13 times, taking 50 humans to space.

Added costs in the past three years alone have topped $800 million with $288 million reported losses Boeing in both 2022 and 2023, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report.

Those have mostly been related to the delay of what should have been its first three rotational missions, dubbed Starliner-1, Starliner-2 and Starliner-3, all still awaiting certification, and therefore not guaranteed.

Through March 31, Boeing listed an additional $229 million in costs for the year with an additional $158 million of “potential termination liabilities to suppliers related to fixed-price unauthorized future missions.”

Original cost projections had its first three rotational missions completed by 2024, but with delays, those may not be finished until after 2026 with Starliner-1 only possible if this flight goes well. NASA has it targeted for February 2025 but is also prepping SpaceX’s Crew-10 to potentially fly then if Starliner faces more delays.

“Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods,” Boeing’s report reads.

During a year that Boeing’s reputation has taken a hit from its airline woes, a win for Starliner could set up a much-needed lift for the company.

“I don’t think of it in terms of what’s important for Boeing, as much as I think of it as in terms of what’s important for this program,” Nappi said. “What’s important is to follow through with the commitments that we made to our customers.”

While SpaceX has ventured beyond its NASA contract to allow for commercial use of its Crew Dragon, the future for Starliner is less clear. Boeing would still share its astronaut taxi duties to the ISS with SpaceX so it would only be flying once per year through 2030 when plans are to decommission the space station.

“We have made some decisions in the last several months on the launch vehicle and making sure that we have enough launch vehicles to get us through — we’re on contract for six flights,” Nappi said. “That carries us out to the end of the decade, and so we’ve got plenty of time to think about what’s after that. And we will do that. But right now the focus is on CFT.”

From NASA’s perspective, the delay was not optimum, but a safe vehicle for its astronauts remains the most important goal of this test flight.

“I work side by side with (Nappi) and the Boeing team every day, and so what I what I see from them is what I’ve seen for the 37 years that I’ve worked in human spaceflight,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager. “It’s really the dedication, the persistence, the perseverance to take it step-by-step, to get the vehicle ready to go fly.”

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