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can get the. >> comcast supports c-span as a public service. along with these other television providers. giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> now, nasa administrator briefs reporters on boeing's first manned spacecraft. the boeing starliner will transport a crew to the international space station from florida. here administrator nelson and the crew fields questions on the launch forecast, safety concerns and space station research. thee station. >> from launch complex 41 on monday, may 6, 10:41 p.m.

eastern time. wilmore and williams will be the first to fly on the star liner, making it only the sixth time nasa has flown a new crew transportation spacecraft. here to speak with you about the recently completed launch readiness review and any other updates on the mission, leaders from nasa, boeing, and you l.a.. as well as a launch officer from the squadron. no stranger over here, nasa administrator bill nelson. we have steve stich, manager nasa commercial program joining us for stan, dana weikel, manager of the international space station program. back here we have jennifer buckley, chief scientist at the space station program, and mark maffei, commercial crew program from boeing.

gary wentz, vice president of government and commercial programs over at you l.a.. and then brian civic, cape canaveral space force station. each will give opening remarks, then we will open questions from here in the room and on the phone. if you are here in the wrong -- the room, wait for the microphone to come to you. you can get the russian by pressing star one. ask one question and try to keep your questions on today's mission. all right, go ahead. mr. nelson: thank you, megan. this is a test flight that rings to bear all the things that the title implies. we are testing the vehicle for, in this case, the first time, with humans on board. megan said that this has been done six times before. so, think of it. for the first time humans have

flown on a new spacecraft. starting with mercury, gemini, then apollo. the space shuttle, and then dragon, now starliner. come next year, it will be the first time that a crew will climb on and will launch on the o'ryan spacecraft, which will take us around the moon. because it is a test flight, we give extra attention. they are checking out a lot of the systems, the life-support, the manual control, all of those things that you want to be checked out. that is why we put two test pilots on board.

of course, the resumes of butch and sonny are extensive. the other thing to comment about this flight is this is all a part of our commercial activities. so, you have already seen commercial crew and -- send cargo to orbit with the dragon and other cargo vehicles. this will give us that additional capability. because we always look for a backup. that is why, if you remember, in the competitions on the spacecraft to be the lander on the moon, nasa had awarded only one. we insisted that we go to a second competition for a second lander. that's the importance of having two give you the robust capability of carrying out the mission.

from the point of view of nasa, it is a fixed-price contract. we share in the development costs, but then the operation is a fixed-price contract. we are doing that as we go to the moon as well. so, we are going to have a whole new adventure. this is very much a part of our exploration of space in what i call the golden age of space exploration. think about it, since we are going to keep the international space station going for another six years, to deorbit into thousand 31 -- in 2031, these

spacecraft will then be able to service the to and from to the commercial space stations, which we expect to have on orbit by the time we are de-orbiting the international space station. so, it is a historical day. it is a wonderful day. by the way, one other historical fact. this is the first time since apollo seven launch that a human astronaut launch is actually on the -- what used to be the air force cape canaveral air force station and now is of course cape canaveral space force station. megan? bill: great -- megan: great

reminder, yes, lots of milestones we are meeting today. thanks. steve: thank you, megan, thank you to everyone for being here and for your interest in our human spaceflight program at nasa. it's been a busy time since we last talked. after the flight test readiness review, that friday the crew got into the vehicle they were pleased, checking out the prep -- spacecraft, the process of getting in and suited up. it all went well. a few things moved around in the cockpit, but that went extraordinarily well. we had a couple of items that we talked about at the press event that we had closed out. we did some analysis of the four heat shields, that was close out you have good flight rationale, should any of those parachutes

not work properly, we have good flight rationale on that. there was one valve at the pad that has been swapped out and we are good to go there. i just got back from complex 41 this morning. it was really exciting to be out there for me, thinking about flying butch and sonny on starliner atlas in a few days. it was great to see the excitement of the team proceeding towards launch. the launch is ready for review and everyone held go to proceed. we bought that timeline into getting the vehicle ready for flight. as megan said, the launch time is 10:34 p.m. eastern. you've got to have good weather, the vehicles all checked out, you've got step-by-step and we plan to dock wednesday early in the morning at 12:46 a.m. eastern time, 26.5 hour

rendezvous. the most exciting thing for me is that at the end we heard from butch and sonny talking about their excitement, asking everyone to hold go and then butch got on and wanted to say one thing to the team, that he is go for launch. it's a super exciting time for the commercial crew. the lr is one of the last major milestones. we will have a management team on saturday to finalize and look at the weather, but i don't see any big items coming up there. it's been a busy time and for me it is exciting to bring star liner and atlas launch online. we have been striving to have two independent space transportation systems. that's been the goal since commercial inception. we are close to reaching that goal with the planned launch on

monday. we'll talk more about that. he moved the dragon on orbit to get things ready, that's already to go. so, overall things are looking good for launch. i know the crew is excited as well. mike, matt, alexandra are excited about having butch and sonny on board. we will work our way through the events of the neck couple of days and when we are ready, we will launch. hope you monday it's important that we are making history. i feel that a lot is a commercial manager. four years ago we brought dragon online and here we are now four years later bringing another system online. we have been taking our time to go through everything methodically. it's a test flight and we want it to go well i'm sure we will learn some checking and double checking and making sure we are ready to go.

i want to thank the entire team on the commercial program, within nasa, the boeing team, how international partners, the united launch alliance. it's been a lot of work to get here. we have a little back over bill: -- over to you, megan. megan: steve, think you so much. over to you, dana, joining us virtually. dana: thank you for joining us to hear about this historic mission. it's a critical milestone for the agency, for commercial crew, the iss, and our partners who will eventually fly on board the vehicle. there are two different vehicles that can travel to the iss and it helps us with any number of nominal scenarios you could encounter. this flight test is a critical steppingstone to reach the

broader goal. steve mentioned it, but on orbit yesterday, the crew got into the dragon vehicle in relocated there spacecraft from the harmony for cork to the venus court, freeing it up the star liner vehicle. just of this morning the iss mission management team convened to review our readiness. everyone was told to go. we only had a couple of open items on board. we had inspection using robotic arms of the docking port. then we have to put in the ominous occasion. we are not working other issues related to the mission, so everything continues to go smoothly. once the starliner's and free flight, the iss team will follow along and do an evaluation along with the commercial crew and the boeing teams. thursday, we will have another

mission management team review the spacecraft performance and give the final go for integrated operations and docking. once butch and sonny are on board, they will be there for a little over a week. primarily focused on the star liner felt, putting it through its paces and looking at the emergency equipment on the spacecraft, verifying the operations we will ultimately need for longer duration missions. to recap some of the other that have gone on, a little over a week ago roscosmos did the spacewalk and deployed some payloads and external hardware outside of iss. last sunday we had the undocking of the cargo mission. one point five days later that successfully splashed down. spacex was carrying 40,000 pounds of research and

scientific investigations back to earth. we are very much looking forward to the crude flight test and we are excited to have which and sonny on board and we are happy that we are making great progress towards the goal of having two u.s. crew providers. megan: dana, thank you so much. talking about having a robust commercial crew program will obviously have an impact on the organization. right, jennifer? jennifer: more crew means more science. we could not do the science that we do on the space station without it being enabled by the crew. to date have done almost 4000 investigations, serving over 5000 researchers. the crew is dedicated to conducting science on the iss as well as participating the elves. on this particular mission they will be a part of two human research studies and will be carrying hardware on the vehicle to enable another human research

study for the european space agency. the crew will be participating in a study called the pilot egress fitness. as we look at going back to the moon and on to morris, it's important for us to understand the physiological impact of spaceflight crew members as we look at them entering a partial gravity environment. we will be able to look at the egress of the vehicle, what they will be able to do technically, feeding heavily into the architecture of the mission that we planned and seeing if we need countermeasures and how we can make them successful on the surface. after exiting the vehicle, they will do a series of studies and tests where they traverse a ladder. eventually the test will evolve to where this crew will do suited rvas. then we will integrate that with the data we collected preflight

and post flight. the other investigation is spacecraft occupancy risk. this is when we look at the forces experienced by the crew to help them build a better model of what the forces look like for reentry and landing. it's similar to what's done in the auto industry. we will be collecting data preflight and most flight on the crew, their physiology, taking a look at things like accelerometers, videos, and even surveys of member experience. finally, the crew will be bringing a hardware's work the space agency investigation. it will be looking at crew members and their response and how we see changes to the spaceflight environment. particularly their white blood cells. this one is interesting because before we always had return the sample so the ground and now we will be able to analyze them on or. megan: thank you.

this is a test flight of many different things, as well as our astronauts. mark? brian: thank you -- mark: thank you, everybody, for being here today. we had a pretty long list of reviews leading up to this and this was just like the rest, showing how well aligned and ready we are for this mission and as of last night we had zero constraints to launch. now we have work to do this weekend to get us ready for monday, including of course rolling tomorrow to the pad. configuring the spacecraft for, for launch. to do that, we will open the hatch and do some final cargo consideration for ingress. then we will do some power ups to make sure your vehicle is performing properly. then we going to launch ups leading us into monday night. we will have the minus one day

if necessary on sunday. the purpose is to make sure the team has got everything they need, review the weather, addressed anything that might come up over those last two days. last thing i will talk about his team readiness. -- is team readiness. i couldn't be more proud. we have planned to be ready on march 1. the window is march, april, may. we said just get ready for when they can accept us. we came back after the first of the year and had a safety check in. butch and sonny came over and shared some of their experiences. told us how excited they were about what was ahead of us. we told the team we don't have to hit the ground running, let's start slow and build momentum and take it at the right time and that is exactly what they have done.

we are at each performance right now and we'll forward to executing the launch in the mission in the same way that we got here. thanks to steve, thanks to gary, we are ready to go. megan: thank you, mark. gary? gary: thank you all for participating, tuning and online, for this. we are honored to be prepping for the crew flight test to sonny and butch's journey to the space station. there is some history surrounding this mission. back in 1962, john glenn flew on the first atlas and, coincidentally, 62 years later we are flying our 100th atlas with butch and sonny on board. that's very significant for our team. if you look at our team, we have been highly focused on the safety of the vehicle, the

safety of the payload, as well as bush and sonny, keeping in our minds their family and the needs of the nation to be able to support this second crude fight -- crude flight vehicle -- crewed flight vehicle. dave interacted with every employee within the team and they have become part of our family as you move forward. we see them on a regular basis. they refer to the hardware as their hardware. it means a lot to our entire team to see them, to have them on the call this morning, addressing the team about their readiness and confidence and getting to work with them. that's extremely exciting and we are just honored to be laying this art of the mission. for this, we designed two different technologies to support human spaceflight.

there is an emergency detection system on board the anna tours all vehicle systems. in the event that we have a not nominal performance of one of the systems and it requires the crew to perform a abort, this will automatically trigger it so that we can monitor those systems and pay close attention to that, as well as designing a dual engine sent tar, bringing back the heritage vehicle that we flew previously. plus what we are flying in the future. a dual engine sent tar, that is specifically for this mission as well. going forward, you know, we also have a, and assent team focused specifically on monitoring vehicle systems and communicating with our flight operations team in houston,

relaying the information to the crew throughout the mission. the team is holy focus on crew safety. we she ate the -- we really appreciate the clean flows we've had. it has been a pleasure to come to the different flight test ratings reviews, flight readiness reviews, and not have issues to talk about. we have had some minor things we have worked through, some experiences coming right after the vulcan flight to atlas. so, we updated the systems in that transition to continue to be flying atlas and vulcan are a couple of years and with that, we will continue to watch through launch, landing, and

recovery of the crew in the vehicle before we call it tests, but everything is looking great and ready to roll. megan: that sounds all great. brian, the weather couldn't be any better? brian: it's a good sign when the weather guy has a smile on his face. happy to break the good news. before i get started, i want to acknowledge dr. nelson. he's leading the flight team and i'm telling you he's working hard on a lot of these forecasts. the weather is very favorable here at the launch site. monday is the key launch attempt . we are a few weeks away from our summer thunderstorm season here in east central florida. though we are in a bit of a summer thunderstorm pattern, we don't have the moisture and instability we might have any june, july, august, helping to limit the amount of showers able to develop with heating of the afternoon.

monday, we expect light, south or seemly flow to help with the sea breeze to push inland too far and west. after the evening hours and sunset you will start to see the shower activity die off as we head closer and closer. overall, the weather looks favorable at the launch site. if we could bring that up, that is a high percent probability of violation, 95% chance of go. i want to copy out and say that we work closely with the spaceflight urology group out of houston led by tim gardner. being a maga -- being a crewed

launch, we will be monitoring it closely, the percent go influences the launch site. we have set rules for commit. designed to protect not just the natural lighting, but the rocket triggered lighting, lightning strikes that would not have actually occurred. going to the back of day, in the event we didn't have another, but if mother nature throws a curveball at us, our weather team will be on consult, watching closely, ready to go. megan? megan: brian, thanks for coming and smiling today, we really appreciate it. here in the room, questions. marsha, two hands up. let's start with you. [laughter] coleman associated -- marsha:

for mr. nelson, associated press, what personal server and says have you gotten from boeing that issues on the spacecraft side have not spilled over? have you spoken to dave calhoun about this? bill: i've spoken to him many times. the aircraft division of boeing has had the recent problems with the bolts on the panel falling out. but dave calhoun, when i first met him, he introduced me to his new head of boeing defense and space. he said this guy is a good one. he said -- he is going to make sure that everything is working in the defense and space sector,

wishing's star lab. -- which includes the star lab. my interpretation is just like has been ordered to you today. they have done it without a hitch. that this is a clean spaceship that is ready to launch. i can tell you, from the nasa point of view, we don't launch until it's ready. megan: thank you, marsha. over here? jeff: space news for gary. is there anything different about this atlas from other atlases? hardware or procedures that account for the inflow? gary: other than the emergency detection system, it's pretty

much a standard atlas five vehicle, goes through the same standard procedures and processes. the only other significant difference is it doesn't have a payload airing. as you have seen twice previously, there is a capsule with a skirt on top. that's when flight proven and checked out. we are comfortable going forward. megan: we will take a few more in >> i'm james our local reporter at channel six. is the source of your confidence working through the delays over the fast few years in overcoming that adversity brought you to this point where you are prepared as possible? >> we go through pretty rigorous process to get here. where my source of confidence comes from is going through that process and getting the alignment i talked about

earlier. we work very closely with nasa, with everything we do from the factory floor to the software and all of her engineering design and our certification products. would come to the point where we are in total agreement. you cannot be more confident than that. >> ok, and we have will in the back. just remind those on the phone, hit*1. >> thanks so much for taking the time. a question for gary, couple of years ago, you were asked about the process of progress toward the vulcan rocket. have there been any updates towards that? what are you looking at with this mission and the success of the next six flights of star liner that made help inform you. >> as we move forward with

vulcan and human rating, we are continuing to do different studies. a lot of the hardware is common. the entire avionics is common so there is a lot of capability that we have designed into vulcan moving forward. as we work with boeing and other customers on human rating, we are looking forward to the opportunity to fly vulcan as well with humans on board. >> let's go to the phones now. jonathan with fox news. can you harris? >> yes, i can, thank you for taking my question. my question is about backup launch date. i believe you said it was may, 7, 10 and 11 and i wonder what times of day are you looking at for each of those dates? >> i can provide those. the first backup opportunity we scrub on monday into tuesday, may 7 and it would be 10 or 11

p.m. eastern time. i don't have the time for the tent but we have the 10th and 11th and we can get those times for you. >> may 10 is at 9 p.m. and may 11 at 830 p.m. all eastern time. ok, we also have jody on the phone. >> thanks. i have one question for whoever will answer. what items will he astronauts beat monitoring during the mission throughout lunch? items of might require a for long-duration missions like the batteries on star liner i believe are fine but they might not be fine for a long-duration state. will anything else be examined along with that during the mission? >> first of all, it's been said this is a test flight.

all of the spacecraft systems will be monitored. there is really nothing particular that we will be looking at that we know today we want to change. we have some things like the batteries that we are working to potentially modify and upgrade. we are going to depend on the flight test objectives to give us feedback if there is anything that needs to be changed with the vehicle. we talked earlier about the purpose of this mission is last time we flew the vehicle, it was autonomous and this time we are flying with people and we will check that interface between the human element and the vehicle itself. we will be relying on a lot of the feedback on any future modifications we want to make. >> i would say there is not major changes we are planning for star liner one. we will continue to upgrade the vehicle and boeing has plans to

do various upgrades. one thing we will put in place on star liner one is a little bit better capability for landing in the wind. it's got an upgrade to some of the structure that holds the airbags on star liner. that is planned for star liner one but the other upgrade i would say is star liner today can dock with the international space station. if you think about what from the forward port to the scene of accommodate star liner. that's for star liner one, we will have the capability to dock and undock from the zenith port and also do the port relocate operations. that's a big upgrade plan in the software. if you remember what we did four years ago, it was basically the same thing with dragon. demo to could only go to the forward port and for crew one,

we have the capability to go to either port. that's the other big piece of software and modifications to the gnc system we will have in place. > thank you both. we have michael from the wall street journal on the phone. >> thanks a lot. could you talk about preparing for any potential contingencies that may come up during the mission and how boeing and nasa will be communicating about the decision-making? >> i think it's probably twofold. the first is the team is executing the mission. they train and train and train for these contingencies. they are well experienced to react to them. we let them react to them and we rely on the feedback of our mission director and steve's

operations manager to give us the information that we need in case we need to help them or we need to communicate across the industry work medicaid out. we have contingency plans in place so that we are executing them inside our programs and insider companies and we are executing across nasa if necessary. >> i would add that it's been even for the long haul, since the contract was worried about teamwork and if you step back, the flight control team has flight rules and procedures in place for many contingencies if a piece of hardware fails, they can use the backup hardware. that's all well practice and i go through simulation and train and understand those flight rules. it's much like we had for space shuttle.

if there was something outside the flight rules or the procedures we needed to do on the mission, and then the nasa team can wait and and nasa will follow along with the flight step-by-step. we understand the systems and we want to do that to help with crew safety but our ultimate goal is to certify this vehicle for the six month increment. we will have people in place and work it side-by-side with mark's team and we have prepared and trained with simulations and we will work through anything the comes up. >> just a reminder, if you're on the phone, hit star one. i just want to open up the floor here for anyone with questions. we will take one here in the front.

>> i have a question for anyone to answer. let me know the possibility of japanese astronauts being aboard the star liner after the initial tests. >> we do expect after we get through the certification flight , the crew flight test that we would start flying international partner astronauts as soon as star liner one. we are already working with the international partners including the japanese space agency isa and cosmos to share information so they can understand the spacecraft. we will keep doing that in preparation for star liner one and subsequent flights as well. >> i saw another hand on this side. >> when will we see the russian

cosmonauts fly in the, thank you. >> would you like to take that? >> i'm sorry, someone was talking over it. can you repeat it? >> my question was when will we be able to see the russian cosmonauts fly aboard the star liner? >> for all of our international partners, we are going to the process of getting them all of the data they need to be comfortable with flying their crewmembers on the vehicle. the first test flight, all of the partners are just looking at the readiness of the spacecraft and the safety associate with bringing spacecraft close to iss for the rendezvous, integrated

operations and docking. they are go in their commitment for this flight is limited to that. once we have the results from this crew test flight, we will share that data with the partnership and use that to go through their own readiness and approval processes. we expect on the cosmos side that they are most likely to see a long-duration flight also so we think they will want to fly with us starting with the star liner 2. >> we have another one in the room here, two in the room, go ahead. >> to piggyback off of that, with star liner one flying likely in the spring of 25 if all goes well with this mission and alternating with dragon, how will that work with the swap without a cosmonaut on the first mission maybe not until the second, if you can clarify the flow of that and what the

back-and-forth will look like moving forward. will we see star liner in the spring and dragon in the late summer? >> we are still working through that with our rus cosmos counterparts. we want to do an integrated crew and we have more robust capability overall similar to the reason why we want different crew vehicles to protect for a lot of different scenarios. we intend to still fly crewmembers on the soyuz vehicle but we haven't reached agreement for the overlapping time with star liner one. that's work in front of us for the expectation is even if we can't make that swap work, we will go back to the integrated crew and swapping for the rest of flights. in terms of the cadence of the flight, once we anchor the first ,,.

>> one in the room here. >> thanks for being here. what are the differences between flying a two-member crew as opposed to four? are there things you're going to glean and learn from this one that will -- are there big gaps or differences? or is it the same no matter how many number you have onboard? that probably is for privacy . >> that's a great question. one of the things we are going to do while docked is do what i would call a habitability evaluation. we'll get extra crew members in the vehicle and think about what it would be like with four people. butch and sunny will help us out. they'll go through how you live and work in space in starliner with us in those two. and i think there is such experienced pilots and astronauts, they'll be able to give us a feel for what is it going to be like to have two additional crew members. the vehicle itself is designed

to be flown really by a single crew member with the ground helping them. we always want to have a backup. commander and pilot. that's our heritage and tradition. just like the aviation industry. adding a couple extra crew members, it's about habitability, how things are be -- will be working and sleep. >> back to the phones. we have gina from nbc news. >> for dana, how important is this mission to add robustness to your systems on the space station? dana: great question. i know you heard it said by a number of the speakers today. i think i'll share an example. when we had the soyuz leak onboard and the soyuz issue. the first discussion point was if we need to how do we safely get the crew home?

in that case we had plans for contingency coverage if we had to bring the whole crew home on a spacex dragon, we could have done that. the more dissimilar capabilities you have, the moreau bust you are for dealing with issues that could arise on bod or with the launch vehicles. today we are launching on crude dragon vehicles. we have the f-9 if there is a problem that could atp*ebgt the 234r50e9 and stand down for -- affect the fleet and stand down for a while. we need the crew up there to take care of the vehicle systems. so if we had a period where we didn't have crew there, we could suffer a lot of degradation to the vehicle itself. really important for to us have robust and redundant capability to keep us crewed and the vehicle healthy. >> thank you. also on the phone we have tim, payload space.

tim: hello, everyone. this is a question for mark. i'm curious looking at the history of this commercial crew program and starliner, it's certainly been up and down. i think we hope to see them fly earlier. now we are at the launch pad i was curious if you could compare and contrast with other being pwo*eg programs you have been involved with. give us a sense what makes starliner unique and why it's taken this path to get to the launch pad? mark: design and development is the phase that we have just come out of. and are ending. and going into operations. design and development is like -- it's constant ups and downs, but the overall slope is always up. that's where we have gotten to today. we are on the slope -- we are basically at the top of that slope. now starting to get into operations. it was typical on s.o.s. the

program i was on previously. i was on shuttle for most of my career in the early days of operations. it was almost similar. just because you are maturing in the lifecycle of operations. this program has been maturing over the last 10 years. it's pretty typical that a human space flight vehicle from design to flying humans is about a 10-year period. that's where we are. >> we also have joey on the phone again from reuters, can you hear us? joey: this might be -- i don't know if somebody said this or know this. i'm curious can someone speak to how autonomous starliner is in general. could you put a percentage on that? is it 100%? what part that have could astronauts manually take control over. is that the contingency with the

systems? >> i can start. first of all fully aton must. we have systems, we have ability for the crew to take over droll. mark: and then we have an additional ability for what we call a backup flight case where we can totally eliminate the flight computers and fly the vehicle manually. it's quite versatile. it's designed to have these backup systems and crew friendly vehicle. steve? anything? steve: we demonstrated it is autonomous. orbit flight tests, too. we demonstrated that capability with no one onboard the weeks autonomously launched, separated from the launch vehicle, got in orbit, did a series of rendezvous burns, got close to the space station, and did the rendezvous profile with the software on the vehicle and ground team monitoring t it is quite capable sraobg of --

vehicle of autonomous flight. it has a tremendous capability for the pilot to fly in various modes. we are going to demonstrate some of those with butch and sunny during the flight in terms of doing manual flying toward maneuvering and pointing the vehicle. once we get on the final approach to the space station, we get up on that final phase, which will make some command intuts putts and democrat -- inputs and demonstrate the ability to fly. >> i think there is more in the room here. >> jeff. jeff: question probably for steve. we had a passing reference earlier to abort weather. what tpeufrpbss if any are there in the pwort weather constraints starliner versus drew dragon? steve: i would say the abort weather constraints are similar. start at the launch pad.

we have a criteria we want f something should happen to the launch vehicle, which we do expect to happen. the spacecraft can separate and land in the water. there is an on shore wind kphoepb kpo*epbent we have to look at -- wind component we have to look at. the only differences between starliner and dragon are the staging points are lynch. different. the atlas first taje takes longer to -- takes longer to burn out. that's a little further north. basically it's similar criteria. we are looking at sea states, prescription, winds, splashdown points, and looking at the overall risk of that for the corridor for the corridor. >> thank. marcia, right behind >> you. >>if you launch on the sixth and

you dock on the eighth, what is your working day for landing? what's the earliest you could land? >> the earliest date right now would be around may 15. that's essentially the first opportunity after the eight days. we assume we need about eight days we look at all the mission objectives we plan to do. it's around the 15th but we will have to look at the weather and we will look at how things are going in the mission. one of the beauties of the manifest that we executed so far this year as we laid out this pretty clear summary wherewith we need to stay longer, we can. the 15th is about the first day. we have to look at that. we got opportunities which is a day landing and then the 17th a

day later would be a night landing. we will look at the weather which may be a little more favorable in the desert after sunset. we will look at that. >> we will go back to the phones. >> with all due respect, 4.5 years ago, we were talking about who will capture the flag. you talked about the program maturing. you got there, can you put perspective on that? since the last time we talked but the long-term future of star liner, have you had any internal discussions at boeing and any decisions moving closer as to how long the spacecraft will operate? >> i'm not sure how to answer your question about maturing. we are to a state now where we are ready to perform a test flight. i have never felt readier on any

mission that i've ever participated in. we are fully aligned with nasa and you l.a.. this is a very clean last month. we are mature and where we are supposed to be at this point. as far as long-term, we've been working on the long-term plans for star liner since the two years i've been on the program. there is a number of areas we had to look at like if we need additional spacecraft, what will be due when we transition the vehicle, when we transition the vehicle? we've knocked a couple of those questions off. what i can tell you is that we have six flights to fly with nasa on this contract. that takes us out to the end of the decade. what we do after that, we have time to make those decisions based on the international space station, based on the other space station that may be put

into orbit after that. those are all things we need to consider as we go forward. >> last call for questions in the room? >> are you looking at any increasing, any scenarios to increase the cadence of flights to the iss? maybe go with shorter crew durations to enable more crews on orbit as well as up the use of the vehicles for more than just once per year? >> wanted to take that, dana. -- why don't you take that, dana? >> we are not going to change the duration of our pre-flights. we will continue with our six month crew flight but i know you seen us do this. we've got private astronaut

missions that have a shorter duration. our intention is to continue supporting the private us from missions which are around two weeks long and we rented to weather and sometimes it can be longer. we will continue to try to fit in as many of those missions as we can no plans right now to change our crew. >> i would add that those six month flights, it seems about right for that increment relative when we can get vehicles ready and go fly. we are also collecting medical data on the cruise. the scientists really want some stable increments to collect that data so they would like the six months to collect how the crew performs and adapts and we flown a few astronauts and cosmonauts out to a year to collect data from ours. some of the data is driven by maybe the 6-1 your direction other than shorter. >> we have time for one more

question. not seeing hands in the room so let's go back to the phones. take it away. >> thank you. a quick one for gary or mark. it's been said that crew rating vulcan should be pretty easing. can you give a ballpark and how much you think that would cost for the crew great falcon given the ease and who would be paying for that? is it you l.a., boeing or nasa? >> how much is going to cost, gary? [laughter] >> i don't know that we are prepared to give an exact figure this point. we definitely are leveraging all the efforts we have made to date on atlas. we will work with boeing to determine. there may be some unique requirements that are brought

forward we need to consider and we would have to factor that in. it's using a lot of common hardware and has the same rl10 upper stage capabilities. we have to look at some of the hazards that are encompassed around that. whether it's fayard or unfair, those of the things we have to work with on nasa requirements. >> we have been working with gary and ula on what it would take to use the vulcan for additional flights after the sixth and that's what we've been working on for the last year and a half or so. it's understanding what will take, what does the flight look like. what are the changes that have to be made. we have a pretty good understanding of that now. we're just looking forward to making those decisions when it's time. >> thank you, everyone for your

questions and interest on in the commercial proof program and the mission we are talking about today. as everyone said, we are go for launch. nasa's boeing quite -- crew flight test will lift off schedule for 10:30 p.m. eastern time and our live coverage on nasa tv and nasa plus and the agency social media channel will begin at 6:30 p.m. eastern monday, may 6. we hope you can join us for this momentous milestone and had a great rest of your day. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracycy >> , phror the wonderful array of mother's day gifts waiting for you at c-span shop.org. discover books, apparel, accessories. something for every c-span mom. plus every purchase you make goes towards supporting our nonprofit operations. start shopping now by scanning the code on the right or visiting online at c-span

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