Starliner Astronaut Water Rescue Training

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore rehearse the steps they would take to exit Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft without assistance in the unlikely event of an emergency resulting in a splashdown. The training exercise, which occurred April 27, 2019, took place several miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It included the astronauts unloading a rescue raft from inside the spacecraft, climbing out through a hatch at the top of the spacecraft, jumping into the Atlantic Ocean and boarding the raft. This open-ocean exercise provides the astronauts with the necessary training ahead of Boeing’s Crew Flight Test and subsequent missions. During normal return scenarios, Boeing’s Starliner will land in a safe zone of about 15 square miles in the Western United States. Throughout the commercial crew development phases with NASA, Boeing has performed dozens of qualification tests on its parachute and airbag systems simulating conditions on land and in the water.