Boeing’s new Starliner capsule was scheduled to be launched on Thursday during a test flight without a crew to the International Space Station, aimed at ensuring the company’s much-needed success after two years of delays and costly engineering failures.
The drop-shaped CST-100 Starliner was scheduled to take off at 18:54 EDT from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida, carried on top of an Atlas V rocket provided by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin Joint Launch Alliance (ULA).
The ULA said Wednesday night’s forecast predicts a 70 percent chance of favorable weather conditions for a timely launch.
If all goes according to plan, the capsule will arrive at the space station about 24 hours later and will take off with the research post into orbit about 400 km above the Earth at 19:10 EDT on Friday.
– @Space_Station
The Boeing must spend four to five days attached to the space station before disconnecting and flying back to Earth, with an airbag cushioned parachute landing on the desert floor of White Sands, New Mexico.
A successful mission will move the long-delayed Starliner one step closer to providing NASA with a second reliable means of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
After resuming crew flights into orbit from the United States in 2020, nine years after the end of the space shuttle program, the U.S. space agency had to rely solely on Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
Payload and passenger model
Starliner will not fly into orbit empty. The capsule will carry a research manikin to collect data on the crew’s cabin conditions during the voyage, plus a £ 500 payload to the space station crew – three NASA astronauts, an astronaut from the European Space Agency in Italy and three Russian astronauts.
Two of the American astronauts will be tasked with boarding the capsule during Starliner’s stay to take measurements of the interior environment and unload supplies.
The launch on Thursday marks a repeat of a test mission from 2019, which failed to successfully meet the space station due to a malfunction of the flight software. Subsequent problems with the Starliner propulsion system supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne prompted Boeing to eliminate an attempt to launch the capsule last summer.
NASA astronauts Sunny Williams, left, Barry Butch Wilmore, center, and Mike Finke, right, watch a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft aboard the vertical integration facility. to the launch site at Space Launch Complex 41 before the Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. (NASA / Joel Cowski)
The spacecraft remained on earth for another nine months while the two companies debated what caused the closure of its fuel valves and which company was responsible for repairing them.
Boeing says it has since resolved the issue with a temporary solution and plans to revamp the propulsion system’s fuel valves after the flight this week.
Starliner was developed under a $ 4.5 billion fixed-price contract by NASA to provide the US space agency with a second low-Earth orbit, along with SpaceX, and proved costly to Boeing.
Delays and engineering failures with Starliner have prompted the aerospace giant to charge $ 595 million in fees after the capsule failed in 2019, even as the company seeks to emerge from successive crises in its jet business and space defense.
If the second unmanned voyage to orbit succeeds, Starliner could fly with his first team of astronauts in the fall, although NASA officials warn that the time period may be postponed.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Mike Finke were assigned to fly on Starliner’s first manned mission. But NASA officials, who are reluctant to tie two astronauts to a flight whose launch date is uncertain, said Wednesday that the mission could carry at least two of each of the four astronauts currently training for the Starliner test.
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