Boeing Starliner’s first astronaut flight interrupted at last minute

The second sending attempt Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule in orbit was cleaned just minutes before its launch.

NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were strapped into the company’s Starline capsule and waiting for liftoff when the countdown stopped at three minutes and 50 seconds. The ship was originally scheduled to lift off from Platform 41 of the Cape Canaveral Space Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT, around the time the Earth’s rotation aligned the platform with the space station’s orbit.

With only a fraction of a second left before takeoff on Saturday afternoon, there was no time to resolve the remaining issues and everything was called off.

The next possible launch window is Sunday. It was not immediately clear whether they would be able to resolve the issue in time.

This long-awaited flight will be the first piloted launch of an Atlas 5 and the first of the Atlas family of rockets since astronaut Gordon Cooper blasted off a few miles away on the final flight of the Mercury program 61 years ago.

Likewise, it will be the first piloted flight of the Starliner, Boeing’s answer to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, an already operational and less expensive spacecraft that has carried 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and civilians into orbit during 13 flights, including 12 to the space station, since a first piloted test flight in May 2020.

NASA funded the development of both spacecraft to ensure the agency could send crews to the outpost even if a company’s ferry was grounded for some reason.

Already years behind schedule due to budget shortfalls and various technical problems that cost Boeing more than $1 billion, NASA had hoped to put the Starliner into orbit on May 6. But the launch was canceled when United Launch Alliance engineers detected problems. with a pressure relief valve in the Centaur upper stage of the rocket.

The Atlas 5 was transported off the platform and back to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility where the Centaur valve was quickly replaced. But following the launch, Boeing engineers noticed signs of a small helium leak in the Starliner’s propulsion system.

The leak was traced to a plumbing flange that delivered pressurized helium to drive a specific jet from the reaction control system in the Starliner’s service module. The leak was described as “very small,” but engineers had to show that it would not become significantly worse in flight and cause problems for other thrusters.

After extensive analysis and testing, mission managers concluded that the spacecraft could be launched safely as is, saying that even if the leak rate was 100 times worse than observed so far, it would not would pose no risk to the crew or the mission.