The Boe-CFT mission, which must qualify the Starliner capsule for manned flights, will be postponed by ten days. One more postponement, but which is a bit anecdotal given all the delay accumulated since the start.
The news broke during the day of May 7. The Boe-CFT mission, which is a test flight intended to qualify the Starliner capsule in crew space transport, will not take place on May 10, as was initially planned. The US space agency has indicated that this attempt will not occur before May 17, at best.
This ten-day delay will make it possible to replace the pressure regulating valve on the liquid oxygen tank, at the Centaur, the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket. The valve did not give satisfaction shortly before takeoff , initially scheduled for the night of May 6 to 7. For safety reasons, it was best to abort the flight.
United Launch Alliance (ULA), the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is providing the launcher. Furthermore, it was also Boeing which was responsible for the construction of the Starliner. The American company has been working for years to complete this program, which should authorize it to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
Seven years late
The postponement decided in May 2024 is yet another postponement among the long list of calendar slips suffered by the Starliner. In fact, it has been 2,500 days since the aeronautics giant was supposed to have achieved this manned flight. It must be remembered that the objective set by NASA for Boeing and SpaceX was the year… 2017.
“ NASA and its aerospace industry partners have set their 2017 schedule with a goal of certification, including at least one test flight to the International Space Station with a NASA astronaut on board “, we read in a blog post from the US space agency dated September 2014.
SpaceX will also have experienced delays on its schedule, since SpaceX’s first manned launch to the International Space Station took place in May 2020 – well after the initial objective of 2017. Since then, SpaceX has carried out many more other manned missions, with a cumulative number of more than fifty astronauts.
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