Boeing’s premier commercial airplane may be grounded for months to come, but the aerospace company’s long-awaited commercial spaceship for NASA astronauts is poised to take off on its maiden voyage this Friday.

The CST-100 Starliner, as the new Boeing spaceship is called, emerged from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program over roughly the past decade. The spacecraft and its rocket were rolled out to the launch pad and is „ready for its inaugural flight,“ NASA on Wednesday said in a blog post.

„In the midst of doing all the work, you don’t step back and look at what you’ve accomplished,“ Kathy Lueders, who manages the program for NASA, said during a press briefing on Tuesday. But „when people see now the vehicle’s out there – the integrated vehicle on the [launch] pad – then it becomes real.“

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is competition between private companies for billions of dollars‘ worth of government spaceflight contracts, with Boeing and SpaceX, founded by tech mogul Elon Musk, as the leaders. More importantly, though, the program is a path to launch astronauts from American soil – a capability NASA lost after its final space shuttle flight in July 2011.

Until a private spaceship proves itself worthy, though, NASA is stuck in a costly predicament of relying exclusively on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from orbit inside Soyuz spacecraft.

No people will ride aboard Starliner on its first launch into orbit, a demonstration mission which Boeing calls the Orbital Flight Test. Rather, the flight is designed to put the rocket and its ship through all the paces – with a spacesuit-clad mannequin named Rosie inside – and show it’s safe to fly NASA astronauts to and from terra firma in the near future.

Foto: Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida on Dec. 5, 2019.sourceFrank Michaux/NASA

Starliner now sits atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA)-built Atlas V rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft is slated to lift off at exactly 6:36 a.m. ET on Friday, December 20, dock with the International Space Station a little more than 24 hours later, and return to Earth in one piece on December 27.

If all goes well with this test mission, two men and one woman will climb aboard a Starliner in mid-2020 and become its first live crew members to take flight.

‚It’s time to deliver‘

Foto: An illustration of a NASA astronaut flying with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon space capsules.sourceNASA/Kennedy Space Center (via Flickr); Boeing; Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

Starliner is one of two commercial spaceships that NASA is paying to develop.

Back in March, SpaceX – a major rival of Boeing and ULA – successfully launched and landed its Crew Dragon spaceship for NASA on a similar demonstration mission, called Demo-1.

Starliner’s and Crew Dragon’s development have not been without problems, though. A few months after Demo-1, for example, the same Crew Dragon capsule recovered from the mission exploded during a ground test meant to try out the vehicle’s launch escape system for astronauts. (NASA refused to share photos, videos, or audio of the failure or resulting investigation with Business Insider after we filed an Freedom of Information Act request. The agency denied our request, plus an appeal to its denial, citing its right to protect SpaceX’s trade secrets and other confidential information – even though Elon Musk, the company’s founder, said in October that „NASA can share all of our IP with anyone that NASA wants.“)

Boeing has met plenty of its own challenges in developing the Starliner, too, including leaky fuel valves and disappointing parachute systems. As a result, both companies are years behind schedule; the first crewed launches were initially planned for late 2017.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s frustration with such delays boiled over in the fall, when he tweeted about the problem on the eve of a big SpaceX presentation about Starship, the company’s planned future rocket ship.

„NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It’s time to deliver,“ he said.

Long before Bridenstine’s public comments, critics have lampooned CCP’s delays in delivering a usable crew vehicle. Lueders on Tuesday defended the program’s timeline, though, citing the pace of past spaceflight development projects.

„Building new spacecraft and developing hardware is really hard,“ Lueders said during Tuesday’s briefing. „Folks say it looks like it’s taken a long time, but I think when you go back and look at development history over time, this program – overall – has been doing a good job of laying out and meeting its obligations.“

Boeing and SpaceX plan to launch their first Commercial Crew astronauts in 2020

Foto: Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner’s four launch abort engines and several orbital maneuvering and attitude control thrusters ignite during the company’s Pad Abort Test on Nov. 4, 2019.sourceNASA JSC/Boeing

The first delivery may arrive within a couple of months, courtesy of SpaceX. According to NASA, SpaceX will attempt to launch a full Crew Dragon abort test no sooner than January 2020, and then its first astronauts on the spaceship no earlier than February 2020.

Meanwhile, Boeing has already completed its launch-abort test and is targeting mid-2020 for a first crewed flight aboard Starliner. Once the ships show they can fly people safely, billions of dollars‘ worth of NASA flight contracts will be on the table.

But just in case there are issues, NASA spaceflight managers are exploring the purchase of more seats from Russia, possibly around $100 million per round-trip flight (based on recent monopoly-fueled price increases).

Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy manager for the International Space Station Program, said during Tuesday’s press briefing that the last Soyuz seat is reserved for around April 2020. Montalbano told Business Insider the agency is looking into buying two more Soyuz seats for its astronauts: one on a mission launching in the fall of that year, and another seat on a spring 2021 mission.

Boeing plans to land and recover the spaceship from Friday’s mission and then refurbish it for a second crewed flight test. Astronaut Sunita „Suni“ Williams is slated to make that flight with fellow astronaut Josh Cassada.

„Make sure you tell them to bring it back in good shape,“ Williams apparently told Pat Forrester, NASA’s astronaut office chief at Johnson Space Center.

How to watch live coverage of the CST-100 Starliner launch

The weather outlook for a launch on Friday is favorable, with about an 80% chance of meeting rules required for lift-off, according to a forecast by the US Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron.

Spaceflight fans can tune in to Boeing and ULA’s launch live by watching NASA TV at that time or by using the embedded YouTube video player below.

If liftoff goes well, NASA TV also plans to broadcast key moments of the uncrewed Starliner’s flight to and from space.

A full schedule of events is available at the station’s website.

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This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published at 2:44 p.m. ET on December 17, 2019.