Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule, a teardrop-shaped astronaut pod, has suffered multiple setbacks in recent years. Software failures in 2019 caused its first attempt to dock with the space station to fail. Last year, fuel valve problems added another nine months of delays.
6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) Thursday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Starliner is due to make another launch attempt to the space station without any astronauts on board, aiming to provide Boeing with a much-needed success as society strains. is striving to emerge from successive crises in its airliner sector and elsewhere in its space and defense unit.
“We wouldn’t be here right now if we weren’t confident in the success of this mission,” Butch Wilmore, a NASA astronaut likely to perform the Starliner’s first crewed flight in a spaceship, told reporters on Wednesday. near future. “We are ready. This spacecraft is ready”.
“Teams have worked very hard to prepare for this,” added Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of space operations, noting that the Starliner flight is a test mission. “We learned a lot from the first uncrewed demo (in 2019). We’re going to learn a lot from the second one.”
Last year’s valve problems led Boeing to offer temporary fixes for this week’s mission, company officials said Tuesday, adding that longer-term fixes will be implemented following the mission. The issues have sparked a dispute with one of Boeing’s main suppliers for the Starliner, Archyde.com reported last week.
Starliner will attempt to dock with the space station on Friday and spend four to five days tethered to the orbital outpost before returning to Earth. If all goes as planned, Starliner might fly its first crew of astronauts in the fall, although NASA officials warn that might be delayed.
Butch and NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, two of NASA’s active astronaut corps of 44, had been assigned to the next crewed test flight. But NASA officials, reluctant to tie two of its astronauts to a flight with an uncertain launch date, said Wednesday the mission might carry at least two of the four astronauts training to test the Starliner.
The Starliner’s delays and technical setbacks have led Boeing to take $595 million in charges since the capsule failed in 2019. The spacecraft was developed under a $4.5 billion fixed-price contract from NASA as part of a program that aims, both with Boeing and with its rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to provide the American space agency with two alternative routes for astronauts to the space station.