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08-05-2024
PARIS/ WASHINGTON: Boeing has called off the inaugural crewed flight CST-100 Starliner space capsule after engineers detected an issue with a rocket valve.
The decision to call off the launch on Monday came two hours before the scheduled liftoff and about an hour after two NASA astronauts had strapped into the spacecraft.
The postponement, blamed on a problem with a valve in the Atlas V rocket, was announced during a live NASA webcast.
“Standing down on tonight’s attempt to launch,” NASA Chief Bill Nelson said in a post on X.
“As I’ve said before, @NASA’s first priority is safety. We go when we’re ready.”
It was not immediately clear how long it would take to address the problem, but the next available launch windows for the launch are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights.
The Starliner had been due to transport NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station (ISS), where they would have spent a week before returning to Earth.
The Starliner’s inaugural voyage to the ISS has been closely watched as a sign of Boeing’s ability to rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX for NASA contracts.
NASA in 2014 awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop space capsules for the space agency to ferry astronauts and cargo into space.
The contracts marked the start of a shift by NASA towards public-private partnerships following the end of its space shuttle program.
SpaceX’s Dragon successfully transported astronauts to the ISS in 2020, marking the first time NASA astronauts had launched from US soil in a commercially-built spacecraft.
Starliner flew its first un-crewed mission to ISS in 2022, after an unsuccessful attempt three years earlier.
Monday’s launch cancellation comes at a difficult time for Boeing as the company grapples with several probes into alleged safety lapses at its aviation division.
Following the decision to abort the launch, the astronauts, clad in blue spacesuits, were helped out of Starliner then boarded a van back to their quarters.
Wilmore and Williams, both US Navy-trained pilots and space program veterans, have each been to the ISS twice, traveling once on a shuttle and then aboard a Russian Soyuz vessel.
Their new mission will see them put Starliner through its paces, piloting the craft manually to test its capabilities.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule with a cabin about as roomy as an SUV is set to rendezvous with the ISS for a weeklong stay, before returning to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in the western United States.
A successful mission would help dispel the bitter taste left by numerous setbacks in the Starliner program.
In 2019, during a first un-crewed test flight, software defects meant the capsule was not placed on the right trajectory and returned without reaching the ISS. “Ground intervention prevented loss of vehicle,” said NASA in the aftermath, chiding Boeing for inadequate safety checks.
Then in 2021, with the rocket on the Launchpad for a new flight, blocked valves forced another postponement. The vessel finally reached the ISS in May 2022 in a non-crewed launch but other problems that came to light including weak parachutes and flammable tape in the cabin that needed to be removed caused further delays to the crewed test flight, necessary for the capsule to be certified for NASA use on regular ISS missions. (Int’l News Desk)
