Elijah Williams
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was fueled for a second launch attempt Saturday to boost Boeing Starliner crew capsule in orbit on the first piloted test flight of the crew’s oft-delayed capsule, a trip to the International Space Station.
With NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams monitoring the spacecraft’s automated ascent, the workhorse Atlas 5 was scheduled to lift off from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:25 p.m. EDT, approximately the time when Earth’s rotation carried the platform into alignment with the space station’s orbit.
United Launch Alliance
If all goes well, the Starliner will reach the station on Sunday and dock at the laboratory’s forward port at around 1:50 p.m. Wilmore and Williams plan to return to Earth on June 10.
The long-awaited flight will be the first piloted launch of an Atlas 5 and the first in the Atlas family of rockets since astronaut Gordon Cooper blasted off just a few miles away on the final flight of the Mercury program 61 years ago.
Likewise, it will be the first piloted flight of the Starliner, Boeing’s answer to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, an already operational and cheaper spacecraft that has transported 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and civilians to orbit in 13 flights, 12 of them to the space station , since a first piloted test flight in May 2020.
NASA
NASA funded the development of both spacecraft to ensure the agency could launch crews to the outpost even if a company’s ferry became stranded for any reason.
Already years behind schedule due to budget shortfalls and a variety of technical problems that cost Boeing more than $1 billion to fix, NASA had hoped to launch Starliner into orbit on May 6. with a pressure relief valve on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
The Atlas 5 was removed from the platform and back to the ULA Vertical Integration Center, where the Centaur valve was quickly replaced. But after launch, Boeing engineers saw signs of a small helium leak in the Starliner’s propulsion system.
The leak was traced to a flange in the plumbing that supplied pressurized helium to drive a specific jet of the reaction control system in the Starliner’s service module. The leak was characterized as “very small,” but engineers needed to show that it wouldn’t worsen drastically during flight and cause problems for other thrusters.
After extensive analysis and testing, mission managers concluded that the spacecraft could be launched safely as is, saying that even if the escape rate were 100 times worse than observed so far, it would not pose a risk to the crew. or for the mission.
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