A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was fueled for a second launch attempt Saturday to enhance Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule into orbit on the oft-delayed crew capsule’s first piloted test flight, a voyage to the International Space Station.
With NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams monitoring the ship’s automated ascent, the workhorse Atlas 5 was scheduled for liftoff from pad 41 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT, roughly the second Earth’s rotation carried the pad into alignment with the area station’s orbit.
United Launch Alliance
If all goes properly, the Starliner will meet up with the station Sunday and dock on the lab’s ahead port round 1:50 p.m. Wilmore and Williams plan to return to Earth on June 10.
The long-awaited flight would be the first piloted launch of an Atlas 5 and the first for the Atlas household of rockets since astronaut Gordon Cooper took off only a few miles away on the Mercury program’s closing flight 61 years in the past.
Likewise, will probably be the first piloted flight of the Starliner, Boeing’s reply to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, an already operational, inexpensive spacecraft that has carried 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and civilians into orbit in 13 flights, 12 of them to the area station, since an preliminary piloted test flight in May 2020.
NASA
NASA funded the event of each spacecraft to make sure the company might launch crews to the outpost even when one firm’s ferry ship had been grounded for any motive.
Already working years not on time due to price range shortfalls and a wide range of technical issues that price Boeing greater than $1 billion to right, NASA had hoped to get the Starliner into orbit on May 6. But the launch was scrubbed when United Launch Alliance engineers detected bother with a pressure-relief valve within the rocket’s Centaur higher stage.
The Atlas 5 was hauled off the pad and again to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility the place the Centaur valve was shortly changed. But within the wake of the launch scrub, Boeing engineers noticed indicators of a small helium leak within the Starliner’s propulsion system.
The leak was traced to a flange in plumbing that delivered pressurized helium to drive one particular response management system jet within the Starliner’s service module. The leak was characterised as “very small,” however engineers wanted to present it might not drastically worsen in flight and trigger issues for different thrusters.
After in depth evaluation and testing, mission managers concluded the spacecraft could possibly be safely launched as is, saying that even when the leak price was 100 instances worse than up to now noticed, it might not pose a threat to the crew or the mission.