CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. • NASA astronauts and officials on Wednesday said Boeing Co’s Starliner space capsule is ready for its uncrewed launch this week to the International Space Station, a long-delayed test mission meant to demonstrate the aerospace giant can safely fly humans in space.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule, a gumdrop-shaped astronaut pod, has experienced multiple setbacks in recent years. Software failures in 2019 nixed its debut attempt to dock at the space station.

Fuel valve issues last year added nine months of further delays.

At 4:54 p.m. EDT on Thursday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Starliner is set to make another attempt at launching to the space station without any astronauts aboard, aiming to provide Boeing a much-needed success as the company strives to climb out of successive crises in its jetliner business and elsewhere in its space and defense unit.

“We wouldn’t be here right now if we weren’t confident that this would be a successful mission,” Butch Wilmore, a NASA astronaut likely to fly on Starliner’s first crewed flight sometime in the future, told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re ready. This spacecraft is ready.”

“The teams have been working really hard to get ready for this,” added Kathy Lueders, NASA’s space operations chief, underlining that the Starliner flight is a test mission. “We learned a lot from the first uncrewed demo (in 2019). We’re gonna learn a lot from the second one.”