The launch countdown for Boeing’s new Starliner space capsule on its inaugural crewed test flight was halted on Saturday, postponing the mission for at least 24 hours.
The CST-200 Starliner’s first voyage carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has been highly anticipated and much-delayed as Boeing scrambles to gain a greater share of lucrative Nasa business now dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The first attempt by Boeing to send an uncrewed Starliner to the space station in 2019 failed due to software and engineering glitches. A second try in 2022 succeeded, paving the way for efforts at getting the first crewed test mission off the ground.
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A May 6 countdown was halted just two hours before launch time over a faulty pressure valve on the Atlas upper stage, followed by weeks of further delays caused by other engineering problems, since resolved, on the Starliner itself.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule had stood poised for blastoff from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket furnished by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.
The postponement was announced during a live Nasa webcast.
Launch forecasts on Saturday had called for a 90% chance of favourable weather conditions, and ULA said on social media earlier in the day that all systems were “go” for an on-time liftoff.
Boeing, whose commercial plane operations are in disarray after several sequential crises, badly needs a win in space for its Starliner venture, a program several years behind schedule with more than $1.5 billion in cost overruns.
While Boeing has struggled, SpaceX has become a dependable taxi to orbit for Nasa, which is backing a new generation of privately built spacecraft that can ferry astronauts to ISS and in the future — under its ambitious Artemis program – to the moon and eventually Mars.
Starliner would compete head-to-head with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which since 2020 has been NASA’s only vehicle for sending ISS crew to orbit from US soil.
The flight would mark the first crewed voyage to space using an Atlas rocket since the storied family of Atlas launch vehicles first sent astronauts, including John Glenn, on orbital flights for NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s.
Once launched, the capsule is expected to arrive at the space station after a flight of about 26 hours and dock with the orbiting research outpost some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
Plans call for the two astronauts to remain at the space station for about a week before riding the Starliner back to Earth for a parachute and airbag-assisted landing in the US Desert Southwest — a first for crewed Nasa missions.