Tune in to watch the live broadcast of Boeing's Orbital Flight Test

NASA" Commercial Crew program has picked up the pace in recent months. Back in October, the NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met with the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, to discuss Crew Dragon and the subsequent plans ahead for the two companies. After a successful meeting, last month, SpaceX successfully completed its static fire tests on its spacecraft—Crew Dragon. This was after the company had already made a successful unmanned test flight with the Crew Dragon in March.

On the other half of the horizon, the other candidate for NASA"s Commercial Crew program, Boeing, is also set to launch an unmanned test flight with its CST-100 Starliner vehicle atop the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket shortly.

NASA will be broadcasting the complete launch event on a live stream on YouTube. The countdown to the launch is also up on Boeing"s Starliner website. The live stream should begin shortly, ahead of the launch window at 6:36:43 AM ET (4:36 PT/11:36 UTC).

This test flight, dubbed as Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test, will be the pod"s first voyage to the International Space Station. According to NASA, the primary aim of this test is, "an end-to-end demonstration of Boeing’s ability to launch astronauts to the orbiting laboratory and return them home," which is in line with the Commercial Crew program"s requirements.

Preparations for the launch are already underway and the spacecraft has already been loaded with fuel as well as the anthropometric test humanoid "Rosie" to gather data on the space flight.

For more information and the complete, approximate timeline for the entire event, you may read NASA"s official announcement.