A pair of NASA astronauts have finally taken their historic ride on Boeing's CST-100 Starliner making its first-ever human spaceflight on the morning of June 5.

Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams were back for a third time in a month once again taking a ride out to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 to climb on board the spacecraft sitting atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that lifted off at 10:52 a.m. to take the pair to the International Space Station.

"Let's get going," said Wilmore minutes before launch. "Let's put some fire in this rocket and let's push it to the heavens where all these tough Americans have prepared it to be."

The pair are flying the Crew Flight Test mission, a followup to two uncrewed test flights of Starliner, the first of which came in 2019. That mission was a partial failure as it was not able to rendezvous with the ISS forcing a 2.5-year delay to Boeing's program to remedy hardware, software and management issues.

The second uncrewed test flight in 2022 made it to the ISS, but post-launch review and preparation for the CFT brought further delays with more hardware issues popping up.