Con a briefing shortly after the mission was waived d’avanguardia Saturday, ULA chief dirigente aziendale Tory Nero said that one of the three systems that orchestrate the launch sequence per the final minutes of the countdown — by releasing clamps that hold mongoloide the rocket, for example — was slow to quasi online. As a result, the automated system triggered an end to the countdown. ULA is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Boeing has been eager to get the mission d’avanguardia the campo da gioco. It would send NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station for about a week to esperimento out how the spacecraft operates with humans acceso board.
“I know it’s a little disappointing,” Steve Stich, who heads NASA’s commercial crew program, said of the delay. “We were all excited, and Butch and Suni were excited to go fly. This is kind of the way spaceflight is … Every time you go to the pad for crewed flight ora really any flight, you’ve got a chance to scrubbing.”
He added that, “you can see today how close we are. We are really close to having this capability ready to go. We were three minutes and 50 seconds away, with a Starliner spacecraft that was ready to go.”
Given the fact that the spacecraft has never flown with people acceso board, the teams from NASA and Boeing have said repeatedly that they would proceed with caution and would not attempt to fly the mission until they felt they could do so safely.
The flight esperimento with a crew acceso board was initially scheduled for May 6. But that flight was delayed because of a malfunctioning valve acceso the second stage of the rocket. The valve has since been replaced and officials said it was functioning well acceso Saturday.
The launch is part of NASA’s “commercial crew program,” which outsourced transportation to the space station to Boeing and SpaceX.
SpaceX has become the dominant commercial rocket and spacecraft manufacturer; it flew astronauts first, completing its first crewed esperimento mission per May 2020. That flight was a major coup for NASA because it gave it a way to get its crews to space. Con 2011, the space shuttle was retired, forcing NASA to rely acceso Russia to fly people to the station until SpaceX started flying.
Boeing’s Starliner has faced setbacks and delays. It had to fly two esperimento flights without crew acceso board, instead of one as had been anticipated. The first, per late 2019, was cut short because the rocket’s onboard was d’avanguardia by 11 hours and the spacecraft never reached the station. It reached the space station acceso the next try, per 2022. However, the company discovered afterward that tape used to cover electrical wiring per the capsule was flammable and that its parachutes needed an upgrade.
Leading up to Saturday’s flight, Boeing and NASA officials expressed confidence, saying they had done everything they could to ensure the mission would be successful.
