Boeing Starliner Capsule's First Crewed Test Flight Postponed over Atlas Rocket Glitch

TEMPO.CO, Cape Canaveral - The long-awaited first crewed test flight of Boeing's (BA.N) Starliner spacecraft will be no earlier than Friday NASA said after the planned launch on Monday, May 6, was halted over a fault with the Atlas V rocket that will carry the new capsule into orbit.

The CST-100 Starliner's inaugural voyage carrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has been highly anticipated and much-delayed as Boeing scrambles to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX for a greater share of lucrative NASA business.

It comes two years after the gumdrop-shaped capsule completed its first test flight to the orbital laboratory without humans aboard. The Starliner's first uncrewed flight to the ISS in 2019 failed.

Its latest flight was scrubbed with less than two hours left in the countdown as the capsule stood poised for blastoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket furnished by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a Boeing-Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) joint venture.

The postponement, attributed to an issue with a valve in the Atlas rocket's second stage, was announced during a live NASA webcast.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the valve, which controls fuel pressure in the rocket stage responsible for pushing Starliner toward orbit, had been “buzzing” audibly in a way the company had noticed before other non-crewed missions. Launch officials decided to delay the countdown under more sensitive rules for an astronaut mission.

The decision to reschedule the flight for Friday was made after a ULA team worked overnight to test the valve and examine how serious the issue was. The next available launch windows were Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights.

The two-member crew - NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore, 61, and Sunita "Suni" Williams, 58 - had been strapped into their seats aboard the spacecraft for about an hour before launch activities were suspended.

They were subsequently assisted safely out of the capsule by technicians and whisked away from the launch complex in a van to await a second flight attempt once the issue had been resolved.

It is not uncommon in the space industry for countdowns to be halted at the 11th hour and for launches to be postponed for days or weeks, even when seemingly minor malfunctions or unusual sensor readings are detected, especially in new spacecraft flying humans for the first time.

Boeing faces intense public scrutiny of all its activities after its commercial airplane operations have been staggered by several crises, including the mid-air blowout of a plane door plug in January. The company has been eager to get its Starliner space venture off the ground to show signs of success and redeem a program 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 its astronauts and other customers to the ISS and, under the space agency's more ambitious Artemis program, to the moon and eventually Mars.

Though Boeing has been relatively mute about its plans to sell commercial Starliner flights, the spacecraft 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 U.S. soil.

REUTERS

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