NASA has announced a new target date for the first crewed flight of Boeing Space’s Starliner spacecraft, targeting no earlier than 6:16 p.m. ET on May 17 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch was initially scheduled for May 9 but was scrubbed due to an issue with a valve on the upper stage of ULA’s Atlas V rocket.
Teams have since rolled the Starliner and Atlas V rocket to an integration facility to replace the faulty valve, and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have returned to quarantine. Following Monday’s scrub, NASA issued a statement offering more details about the valve problem, stating that the oscillating behavior of the valve during prelaunch operations ultimately resulted in the launch scrub.
After the ground crews and astronauts safely exited the launch complex, the ULA team successfully commanded the valve closed and the oscillations were temporarily dampened. However, the oscillations re-occurred twice during fuel removal operations, and after evaluating the valve history and data signatures, the ULA team determined that the valve exceeded its qualification and mission managers agreed to remove and replace it.
While the setback is disappointing for the mission team, safety remains the top priority, and engineers decided out of an abundance of caution to halt the countdown clock and prepare for launch on another day. When the mission finally gets underway, Wilmore and Williams will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) and stay for about a week before returning home.
The aim of the flight is to confirm the operability of the Starliner’s onboard systems so that the vehicle can be used by NASA to carry crews to and from low-Earth orbit in the same way that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has been doing since 2020. The Starliner project has faced numerous delays over the years as Boeing worked on issues that emerged following the spacecraft’s first test flight in 2019, when it failed to reach the ISS. Another uncrewed test flight in 2022 saw the Starliner dock with the ISS before returning to Earth in a successful parachute landing.
NASA and Boeing are now targeting May 17 for the first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft, pending the successful resolution of the valve issue. The mission will be a major milestone for Boeing and NASA, as it will mark the first time that a commercial spacecraft has carried astronauts to the ISS.
