Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft would carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station.
Photo: EFE – CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH
NASA and Boeing announced that among their plans they plan to finally launch the first manned mission of the Starliner spacecraft this Wednesday, June 5. The news is published after last Saturday, less than four minutes before launch, takeoff was postponed due to technical problems.
In a statement, both entities explained that these additional days helped evaluate the technical problem that occurred on the launch pad. The objective of this mission is to take NASA astronauts Barry ‘Buthc’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams to the International Space Station (ISS).
Last Saturday, with 3 minutes and 50 seconds left before the spacecraft took off, the Ground Launch Sequencer found an anomaly and aborted the mission. Tory Bruno, director of the mission, explained at a press conference that the main cause “could be a defective card within a sequencer system that is located in a structure at the base of the platform.”
It is not the first time that the launch of this ship has been postponed. At the beginning of May, a small helium leak had been reported in the service module of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. The team worked “to develop operating procedures that ensure the system retains sufficient performance capability and adequate redundancy during flight,” NASA wrote at the time.
If NASA and Boeing, after conducting various analyses, find that the flaws have not been overcome, they will postpone the launch to Thursday, June 6. And, in case the ship is not ready in either of these two days, the team will have to wait at least ten days to be able to change the rocket batteries.
As for the astronauts, while the rocket overcomes these failures, they have remained in quarantine in Houston. Wilmore and Williams are the first astronauts to launch aboard Boeing’s Starliner to the space station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The two will spend about a week in the orbital laboratory before returning to Earth and making an assisted landing with parachutes and airbags in the southwestern United States.
