Two astronauts are waiting for their chance to blastoff aboard Boeing’s new Starliner space capsule. The trip to the International Space Station for NASA veterans Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore will be powered by an Atlas-V rocket, built by the United Launch Alliance at its factory in Decatur, just south of Huntsville. This is the first Atlas-V launch with people on board, but this model of rocket has boosted a series of unmanned spacecraft to Pluto, Mars, and the asteroid Bennu.
Scientists at NASA are studying rock and soil samples from Bennu. These bits and pieces from deep space were delivered back to Earth by the robotic spacecraft known as Osiris-Rex. That’s less of a mouthful than the vehicle’s full name, which is "Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer." That trip, and the asteroid samples that resulted, were due to an Alabama built Atlas-V.
Another NASA mission powered by an Alabama Atlas-V was to the planet Mars. The rocket sent the unmanned lander called The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, or “Mars InSight” for short. This robot studied “Mars quakes” and other geologic forces on Mars that shaped its surface. InSight also sent back audio recordings of the winds blowing in the red planet’s thin atmosphere.
Astronomers got their closest views of Pluto, once a “planet” and now referred to as a “dwarf planet,” by the New Horizons spacecraft. The robotic vehicle flew to the farthest known planet, and its moon Charon, on an Atlas-V built by United Launch Alliance in Decatur. The visit took place in 2015, before New Horizons travelled on to a rendezvous with Arrokoth, a chunk of space debris in the so called Kuiper Belt, which NASA says is a collection of debris including dwarf planets and comets that encircles the solar system beyond Pluto’s orbit.
And, the Atlas-V also launched the first five flights of a classified Pentagon spacecraft called the X37B. The unmanned vehicle resembled NASA’s retired space shuttle, except it contains no windows since no crew will ever ride the craft to orbit. The X37B reportedly has a payload bay with doors that open, again the shuttle. But, what the spacecraft did on its missions was secret. The latest two launches of the X37B were on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The Atlas-V set for the launch of Boeing’s new Starliner space capsule is poised for liftoff at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, near the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
