Boeing Launches Astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore & Sunita "Sunni" Williams on Starliner

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — When Boeing's Starliner capsule carries two astronauts to space tonight (May 6), at least 100 people in Mission Control will be on hand for support and guidance.

Tonight's mission, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), will be the first-ever crewed liftoff for Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. CFT will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams toward the International Space Station (ISS) at 10:34 p.m. (0234 GMT Tuesday, May 7) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here. You can watch it live here at Space.com, via NASA Television.

But not all the action is in Florida: Boeing and NASA are working together at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston to send this crew into space, marking the first time since the space shuttle era that a crewed spacecraft was controlled from Houston.

Among Starliner's vast support group is Teresa Kinney, the first-ever female chief engineer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, on Florida's Space Coast. Kinney will sit as backup to Mission Control as a consultant for other engineers. While talented, some of the main controllers "jumped in late" compared to Kinney, she told Space.com. "So if you had a problem that they hadn't seen, or maybe some testing they hadn't been involved in, hopefully I can provide that continuity," she added.

Related: I flew Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in 4 different simulators. Here's what I learned (video, photos)

Kinney has been working with NASA's Commercial Crew Program for years, mainly on the Starliner side; in fact, she has been on commercial crew since the days of the Constellation program. That was a Bush-era proposal from the early 2000s, later repealed, that also aimed to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars.

Kinney said her role evolved as the Commercial Crew Program did, as the hardware matured and testing continued. Contracts were first awarded in 2010, and both SpaceX and Boeing were selected in 2014 as the first commercial crew vendors to send astronauts to space.