Can get the. Comcast supports cspan as a public service. Along with these other television providers. Giving you a front row seat to democracy. Now, nasa administrator briefs reporters on boeings 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 todays 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 oryan 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 lifesupport, 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. Thats 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 fixedprice contract. We share in the development costs, but then the operation is a fixedprice 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 deorbiting 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. Its 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. Youve got to have good weather, the vehicles all checked out, youve got stepbystep 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. Its 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 dont see any big items coming up there. Its 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. Thats been the goal since commercial inception. We are close to reaching that goal with the planned launch on monday. Well talk more about that. He moved the dragon on orbit to get things ready, thats 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 its 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. Its a test flight and we want it to go well im 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. Its 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. Its 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 starliners 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, its 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. Its similar to whats 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 hardwares 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 couldnt 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 dont have to hit the ground running, lets 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 well 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 butchs 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. Thats 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. Thats 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 weve 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 couldnt be any better . Brian its 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. Hes leading the flight team and im telling you hes 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 dont 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 didnt 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. Lets 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 ive 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 i