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We may have to wait a bit to see the Boeing Starliner The astronaut taxi takes off again.
Starliner was originally supposed to be launched last Friday (July 30) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida for a crucial unmanned mission to the International space station for NASA called Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2).
Unexpected fire from the thrusters of the Nauka module recently arrived in Russia significantly tilted the orbiting laboratory Thursday (July 29), however, and the take-off of OFT-2 was postponed to Tuesday (August 3) to give station managers time to assess the situation.
But in the hours leading up to launch on Tuesday, Boeing reported that the Starliner team had discovered “unexpected valve position indications” in the capsule’s propulsion system. Boeing and NASA withdrew from today’s attempt to investigate the matter, stating that a takeoff on Wednesday (August 4) remained a possibility.
Live Updates: Follow Boeing’s Starliner OFT-2 mission here
But this is no longer the case. On Tuesday evening, Boeing officials said Starliner will not fly on Wednesday and did not give a new target launch date.
“We’re going to let data drive our work,” John Vollmer, vice president and program director for Boeing’s commercial crew program, said in a press release. “Our team has worked diligently to ensure the safety and success of this mission, and we will not launch until our vehicle is nominally running and our teams are satisfied that it is ready to fly.”
Starliner and his rocket ride, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V, will be brought back from their launch pad to the assembly facility on Wednesday “for further inspection and testing to inform next steps,” the statement added. This will be the second such reverse trip for the duo, who have also been moved back from pad Friday (July 30) to protect them from the elements.
Boeing developed Starliner with funding from NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which also supported SpaceX’s work on its astronaut taxi, Crew Dragon. Crew Dragon is fully operational – it’s in the middle of its second contract crewed mission to the station for NASA – but Starliner must pass OFT-2 before it can transport astronauts.
As the name suggests, OFT-2 will be the second such flight for the Boeing spacecraft. On the first test, in December 2019, Starliner suffered several serious software issues, got stuck in the wrong orbit for an encounter with the space station and returned to Earth after orbiting solo for two days.
The nature of the propulsion valve problem remains a mystery at this time, but engineering teams “have ruled out a number of potential causes, including software,” Boeing officials wrote in the statement. “The issues were first detected during checks after lightning storms passed over the Kennedy Space Center on Monday,” the statement added, referring to the NASA center next to the Cape Town space station. Canaveral.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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