Ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station has almost become routine — but not for Boeing and not on Monday, when after years of delay it’s finally set to launch two crew members to the orbiting platform on a critical test flight.

The Arlington, Va.-based aerospace giant was awarded a $4.2-billion contract in 2014 to build and operate a spacecraft to service the station, while El Segundo rival Space X received $2.6 billion to do the same.

Both were given out under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, established to have American companies taxi astronauts to the station.

The stakes are particulary high for Boeing. Since 2020, SpaceX completed its crewed test flight and has ferried eight operations crews to the base — while Boeing has managed only two unmanned flights, including one that docked remotely in May of last year.

Boeing has long-standing and historic ties to the aerospace industry in Southern California — the Apollo command and service modules were built at North American Aviation’s plant in Downey. Its current operations include a satellite facility in El Segundo.

Boeing’s new Starliner capsule was scheduled to launch with a crew last summer, but a problem was discovered with its parachute system and the use of flammable tape in the craft, a mile of which was removed. It was just the most recent of several delays.

Starliner, with crew members strapped in, is set to blast off at 7:34 p.m. Pacific time at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. If the weather doesn’t cooperate or other minor issues arise, it could fly the next day or later in the week.

After the delays and a reported $1.5 billion in cost overruns the company had to absorb, analysts say it’s critical that the mission goes well. That’s especially true, given Boeing’s already battered reputation, after two crashes of its 737 Max 8 jets and a door plug that blew out of a 737 Max 9 flight this year on its way to Ontario International Airport in San Bernardino County.

“It’s very important for [Boeing’s] desire to be relevant to NASA, relevant to manned space flight and for confidence internally to turn around and execute a program that’s had problems,” said Ken Herbert, a Boeing analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “This could be a big win for Boeing, if they can successfully pull this off, just in light of all the bad news they get from every other part of the business.”

The capsule is designed to be reused 10 times, similar to SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule that services the station. It will be launched from an Atlas V rocket, a reliable workhorse built by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Starliner should take about 26 hours to reach the station, which orbits at roughly 17,500 mph.

The flight plan calls for NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to spend a minimum of eight days testing the docked Starliner capsule, before returning to Earth as soon as May 15. Unlike SpaceX’s capsule, which splashes down on water, Starliner will deploy giant air bags and touch down on land in one of four possible locations in the Southwest — a system the Russian space program has used since its inception. Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County is a contingency landing zone.

Assuming the flight is a success, Boeing would be cleared to fly Starliner on regular flights carrying cargo and astronauts, where it would stay docked for six months and provide NASA with a second, redundant American craft to reach the station, a longtime goal. The 15-feet-in-diameter capsule, shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss, can carry up to seven astronauts without cargo or fewer with it.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson expressed confidence in the flight despite problems Boeing has experienced with its commercial aircraft.

“Understand that anytime you fly in space, it’s risky business, but we don’t fly, until we — NASA — are satisfied that it is as safe as possible,” he told The Times.

A Boeing spokesperson declined to respond to requests for comment.

Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference Friday, “I have never felt readier on any mission that I have ever participated in. … We are where we are supposed to be at this point.”

NASA contracted with SpaceX and Boeing after being forced to rely solely on the Russian space program to resupply and send crews to the station after the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

A longer-term issue for Boeing is that it has taken so long to certify Starliner that it might only service the station for its contracted six missions before the lab is sent back to Earth in 2031 in a controlled descent, where it will burn up in the atmosphere. Initially assembled in 1988, it is now the size of a football field and some pieces are expected to land in the far reaches of the ocean.

NASA wants to focus its resources on planned missions to the moon and deep space through its Artemis program, and the Russians aren’t interested either, said aerospace analyst Marco Caceres of Teal Group.

“The Russians have certainly expressed their desire not to continue their presence for no more than another 10 years,” he said.

While the station includes modules from multiple countries, NASA and the Russian program were its primary constructors, including a core power module the Russians sent up on the very first launch.

There have been nearly 4,000 scientific studies conducted on the station and now NASA is funding and supporting the development of commercial space stations where it can lease space to conduct science as needed. That includes Orbital Reef, a planned station by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company.

NASA expects that Boeing and SpaceX will service those stations, and Boeing has said it has plans to launch Starliner to ferry astronauts to the station, which is still in its early development stages. Nappi said Friday that the company will “have time to make those decisions.”

Even if the Starliner flight goes flawlessly, NASA will continue to send astronauts to the space station on Russia’s Soyuz craft, given the country’s key role in building and continuing to operate the station.

Nelson said that aside from Russia’s operational role, it is important for the two space programs to maintain good relations despite tensions over the war in Ukraine, noting that each country has personnel embedded in the other’s mission control operations. He recalled how that relationship began when an Apollo capsule docked with a Russian Soyuz craft in a historic test project started amid the Cold War.

“This cooperation in space has been going in genuine success ever since Gen. Tom Stafford and Gen. Alexei Leonov came across that threshold docked in space in 1975,” he said. “There has been no evidence we have any problem. It is steady as you go.”

When you use Facebook Messenger these days, a new prompt greets you with this come-on: “Ask Meta AI anything.”

You may have opened the app to send a text to a pal, but Meta’s new artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot is tempting you with encyclopedic knowledge that‘s just a few keystrokes away.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has planted its home-grown chatbot on its Whatsapp and Instagram services. Now, billions of internet users can open one of these free social media platforms and draw on Meta AI’s services as a dictionary, guidebook, counselor or illustrator, among many other tasks it can perform — although not always reliably or infalliably.

“Our goal is to build the world’s leading AI and make it available to everyone,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer at Meta, as he announced the chatbot’s launch two weeks ago. “We believe that meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”

As Meta’s moves suggest, generative AI is making its way into social media. TikTok has an engineering team focused on developing large language models that can recognize and generate text, and they’re hiring writers and reporters who can annotate and improve the performance of these AI models. On Instagram’s help page it states, “Meta may use [user] messages to train the AI model, helping make the AIs better.”

TikTok and Meta did not respond to a request for comment, but AI experts said social media users can expect to see more of this technology influencing their experience — for better or possibly worse.

Part of the reason social media apps are investing in AI is that they want to become “stickier” for consumers, said Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who teaches entrepreneurship and innovation. Apps like Instagram try to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible because captive attention generates ad revenue, he said.

At Meta’s first-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said it would take some time for the company to turn a profit from its investments in the chatbot and other uses of AI, but it has already seen the technology influencing user experiences across its platforms.

“Right now, about 30% of the posts on Facebook feed are delivered by our AI recommendation system,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the behind-the-scenes technology that shapes what Facebook users see. “And for the first time ever, more than 50% of the content people see on Instagram is now AI recommended.”

In the future AI won’t just personalize user experiences, said Jaime Sevilla, who directs Epoch, a research institute that studies AI technology trends. In fall 2022, millions of users were enraptured by Lensa’s AI capabilities as it generated whimsical portraits from selfies. Expect to see more of this, Sevilla said.

“I think you’re gonna end up seeing entirely AI-generated people who post AI-generated music and stuff,” he said. “We might live in a world where the part that humans play in social media is a small part of the whole thing.”

Mollick, author of the book “Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI,” said these chatbots are already producing some of what people read online. “AI is increasingly driving lots of communication online,” he said. “[But] we don’t actually know how much AI writing is out there.”

Sevilla said generative AI probably won’t supplant the digital town square created by social media. People crave the authenticity of their interactions with friends and family online, he said, and social media companies need to preserve a balance between that and AI-generated content and targeted advertising.

Although AI can help consumers find more useful products in the daily lives, there’s also a dark side to the technology’s allure that can teeter into coercion, Sevilla said.

“The systems are gonna be pretty good at persuasion,” he said. A study just published by AI researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that GPT-4 was 81.7% more effective than a human at convincing someone in a debate to agree. While the study has yet to be peer reviewed, Sevilla said that the findings were worrisome.

“That is concerning that [AI] might like significantly expand the capacity of scammers to engage with many victims and to perpetrate more and more fraud,” he added.

Sevilla said policymakers should be aware of AI’s dangers in spreading misinformation as the United States heads into another politically charged voting season this fall. Other experts warn that it’s not if, but how AI might play a role in influencing democratic systems across the world.

Bindu Reddy, CEO and co-founder of Abacus.AI, said the solution is a little more nuanced than banning AI on our social media platforms — bad actors were spreading hate and misinformation online well before AI entered the equation. For example, human rights advocates criticized Facebook in 2017 for failing to filter out online hate speech that fueled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

In Reddy’s experience, AI has been good at detecting things such as bias and pornography on online platforms. She’s been using AI for content moderation since 2016, when she released an anonymous social network app called Candid that relied on natural language processing to detect misinformation.

Regulators should prohibit people from using AI to create deepfakes of real people, Reddy said. But she’s critical of laws like the European Union’s sweeping restrictions on the development of AI. In her view it’s dangerous for the U.S. to be caught behind competing countries, such as China and Saudi Arabia, that are pouring billions of dollars into developing AI technology.

So far the Biden administration has published a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” that offers suggestions for the safeguards that the public should have, including protections for data privacy and against algorithmic discrimination. It isn’t enforceable, though it hints at legislation that may come.

Sevilla acknowledged that AI moderators can be trained to have a company’s biases, leading to some views being censored. But human moderators have shown political biases too.

For example, in 2021 The Times reported on complaints that pro-Palestinian content was made hard to find across Facebook and Instagram. And conservative critics accused Twitter of political bias in 2020 because it blocked links to a New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“We can actually study like what kind of biases [AI] reflects,” Sevilla said.

Still, he said, AI could become so effective that it could powerfully oppress free speech.

“What happens when all that is in your timeline conforms perfectly to the company guidelines?” Sevilla said. “Is that the kind of social media you want to be to be consuming?”

Kristina Bialkowski remembers the day she got her first guitar at the Sam Ash Music Store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

She was 10 and her father, who had started teaching her to play the instrument, took her into the shop down the street from their home to browse.

Now a musician who sometimes plays alongside the singer Geia, Bialkowski recalled staring up at the menagerie of instruments on the wall and feeling elated when she made her choice: a black, electric Fender.

She returned through the years to buy a synthesizer and a bass and, in high school, to hang out with friends, so she felt stunned recently when she drove by and saw a sign announcing that the shop — along with all the other locations in the iconic music chain that grew from a single store in Brooklyn into a nationwide business behemoth — would soon close down.

“No way!” thought Bialkowski, 29, who works in music marketing and also posts covers of songs on Instagram and TikTok. But then she thought back to her recent trips to the shop and how much less busy it had looked than when she was a young girl.

“I guess it makes sense,” she said. “No one really buys instruments anymore. Everyone is a DJ or they’re buying online.”

The company announced the imminent closure of all its locations — including stores in San Diego, Westminster, Torrance, Ontario and Industry — in a post on Instagram this week, saying it had made the decision with “a heavy heart.”

“Thank you,” it read, “for allowing us to serve musicians like you for 100 years.”

The company was founded in Brooklyn in 1924 by Sam and Rose Ashkynase, a young couple who both immigrated to the U.S. as children, he from Austria and she from Russia.

To cover the down payment on the small shop, they pawned Rose’s $400 engagement ring. They managed to stay open through the lean years of the Great Depression, according to a biography on the company’s website.

As it grew through the decades, expanding to other parts of New York and then across the nation, the company stayed in the family — run, at times, by the couple’s sons, grandsons and eventually their great-grandchildren. While Sam died in the mid-1950s, Rose continued to work until she was 80.

In 1998, as the company prepared for a big expansion into the Southland, The Times chronicled how the chain’s growth might hurt independent music stores in the region.

Paul Ash, one of the founders’ sons, who was president of the company at the time, brushed off such concerns, saying, “We feel that we expand a market, not shrink it.”

In a brief history on the company’s website, they describe their story as the quintessential American Dream and discuss “retaining the basic concepts of a family-run business even today.”

“The Sam Ash saga,” it reads, “is a classic business story.”

Indeed, the company’s decision to close all of its retail locations is part of one of the most defining business stories of the modern era, in which bricks-and-mortar stores have struggled to compete with online commerce.

In recent months, several other companies, including Macy’s, REI and 99 Cents Only, have announced plans to close locations in Southern California.

In a written statement, Derek Ash, one of the founders’ great-grandsons, declined to answer a question about why the stores were closing but confirmed that some locations would shutter by the end of the month and others would have sales going through mid-July.

He wrote that the family will always cherish memories of creating a space where many musicians tried out new instruments for the first time or met future band members. Over four generations, he said, they “had the privilege to watch the evolution of music in America.”

For Michael Gallant, who worked at the chain’s location in City of Industry for a few months in 2010, the job provided a critical sense of community that lasted far longer than the gig itself.

The 48-year-old musician — who has performed for years as a member of several Beatles tribute bands and will tell you, with a laugh, that “I’m the Paul McCartney guy” — said he has maintained friendships with several other Sam Ash employees and still cherishes memories of meeting customers.

When he recently heard about the closures through the grapevine, he said he felt bummed but not surprised.

“It certainly sucks,” he said. “But I saw the writing on the wall, mainly ’cause of the internet.”