Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule, a gumdrop-shaped
astronaut pod, has experienced multiple setbacks in recent years. Software
failures in 2019 nixed its debut attempt to dock at the space station. Fuel
valve issues last year added nine months of further delays.
At 6:54pm EDT (4:24am IST, May 20) on Thursday at NASA's
Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Starliner is set to make another attempt at
launching to the space station without any astronauts aboard, aiming to provide
Boeing a much-needed success as the company strives to climb out of successive
crises in its jetliner business and elsewhere in its space and defense unit.
"We wouldn't be here right now if we weren't confident
that this would be a successful mission," Butch Wilmore, a NASA astronaut
likely to fly on Starliner's first crewed flight sometime in the future, told
reporters on Wednesday. "We're ready. This spacecraft is ready."
"The teams have been working really hard to get ready
for this," added Kathy Lueders, NASA's space operations chief, underlining
that the Starliner flight is a test mission. "We learned a lot from the
first uncrewed demo (in 2019). We're gonna learn a lot from the second
one."
Last year's valve issues led Boeing to come up with
temporary fixes for this week's mission, company officials said on Tuesday,
adding that longer-term fixes will be implemented after the mission. The issues
have triggered conflict with one of Boeing's key suppliers for Starliner,
Reuters reported last week.
Starliner will attempt to dock to the space station on
Friday and spend four to five days attached to the orbital outpost before
returning to Earth. If all goes as planned, Starliner could fly its first crew
of astronauts in the fall, though NASA officials caution that could get
delayed.
Butch and NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, two of 44 in NASA's
active astronaut corps, had been assigned to the subsequent crewed test flight.
But NASA officials, reluctant to tie down two of its astronauts to a flight
whose launch date is uncertain, said on Wednesday the mission could carry at
least two of a cadre of four astronauts training to test-fly Starliner.
Delays and engineering setbacks with Starliner have led
Boeing to take $595 million in charges since the capsule's 2019 failure. The
spacecraft was developed with a $4.5 billion fixed-price NASA contract in a
programme that aims, with both Boeing and its rival Elon Musk's SpaceX, to
provide the US space agency with two alternate astronaut rides to the space
station. © Reuters
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