Boeing's Starliner capsule is finally headed for the International Space Station with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams along for the ride.
The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, around 10:50 a.m. Wednesday. It's expected to reach the ISS in about 25 hours.
This launch was a long time coming. In 2014, NASA announced two companies would compete to fly Americans to space: Boeing and SpaceX.
Boeing received $4.2 billion from NASA to build its Starliner ship, while SpaceX got a little more than half of that amount to develop its Dragon crew capsule, which first launched with astronauts in 2020.
Starliner has been marred by technical issues. An uncrewed test flight in 2019 was fraught with problems that prevented the craft from reaching the space station.
It was a costly error that required Boeing to launch a second uncrewed test flight in 2022.
This latest flight was delayed twice — once in early May because of a bad valve inside the rocket and again on Saturday because of a computer's power unit failure.
