by By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – The second attempt to launch Boeing’s new Starliner space capsule was automatically stopped on its maiden test flight with NASA astronauts on board with minutes to go before a computer-aborted system took off, officials said. missions.
The scrambled launch, which caps a series of 11th-hour technical issues that crews on the ground worked on and resolved earlier in the countdown, marks another indefinite delay for the much-anticipated test flight and she was very late.
The next available launch window for the mission is Sunday around noon local time, but NASA said in a statement Saturday that mission officials would overlook that opportunity, without setting a new date. The next chances to ship are Wednesday, June 5, and Thursday, June 6.
“We got close today,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.
“I know it’s a little disappointing, we were all excited. This is kind of the way spaceflight,” he said.
The postponement began on Saturday with computers on the Atlas V rocket’s launch pad coordinating the final moments before liftoff. The Starliner capsule appeared healthy, officials said.
At a news conference after the postponement, executives from Boeing and United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that owns the Atlas V rocket, hoped a review of the computers Saturday night would allow a Sunday launch.
“We’ll take that opportunity or the next one that comes along,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president, told reporters.
The decision not to leave the launch opportunity on Sunday, a NASA statement said, would give the team “additional time” to assess the issue.
The CST-200 Starliner’s first crewed trip to the International Space Station (ISS), with two astronauts on board, remains an important milestone for Boeing as it struggles to get a bigger share of NASA’s lucrative business dominated by SpaceX Elon Musk now.
The gumdrop-shaped Starliner capsule was ready for blast from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, perched atop the Atlas V.
But with three minutes and 50 seconds left in the countdown clock after the flight director gave the final “go” to launch, a ground system computer triggered an automatic abort command that shut down the launch sequence, according to mission officials.
LOOKING AT THE GLITCH
ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the root cause was a “hardware or network communications issue” between three computers that control automated launch systems.
Boeing’s first attempt to send an uncrewed Starliner to the space station in 2019 failed due to software and engineering glitches. A second attempt in 2022 was successful, paving the way for efforts to get the first crewed test mission off the ground.
The May 6 countdown was halted just two hours before launch time over a faulty pressure valve on the Atlas V upper stage, followed by weeks of additional delays due to other engineering problems, since resolved, on the Starliner itself.
The two-member crew, NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, and Sunita “Suni” Williams, 58, were strapped into their seats aboard the spacecraft for several hours before launch activities were suspended on Saturday.
Technicians helped the astronauts safely out of the capsule and out of the launch tower after the aborted flight, returning to their quarantined quarters to await the next flight attempt.
It is not uncommon in the space industry to stop the countdown at the 11th hour and postpone launches for days or weeks, even when minor malfunctions or abnormal sensor readings are discovered, especially in new spacecraft flying for the first time . .
Boeing, whose commercial plane manufacturing operations are in trouble after several crises, desperately needs space success for its Starliner venture, a several-year-old program with more than $1.5 billion in cost overruns.
While Boeing is struggling, SpaceX has become a reliable space taxi service for NASA, providing the only way to launch the ISS crew into orbit from US soil.
NASA, in support of a new generation of private spacecraft, sees Starliner as a second key vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to and from the space station, as well as the moon and eventually Mars under its ambitious Artemis program.
When launched, the Starliner is expected to arrive at the space station after a flight of about 24 hours and dock with the orbiting research center about 250 miles (402 km) above Earth.
Plans call for the two astronauts to stay at the space station for about a week before riding the Starliner back to Earth for a parachute and airbag landing in the US desert Southwest, a first for NASA crewed missions.
Getting the Starliner to this point has been a monumental process for Boeing under a $4.2 billion fixed-price contract with NASA that has since risen to about $4.5 billion, according to a Reuters review of contract changes since it was awarded in 2014.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sam Holmes, Will Dunham, Chris Reese and Paul Simao)
