The second test flight for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, known as the Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission, will only depart in late summer. After months of delays, NASA and Boeing pushed the launch from April to no earlier than August, citing severe weather and technical problems with the spacecraft’s aircraft.
Boeing would be ready in May to launch the unmanned Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station should an earlier opportunity arise, the company said in a statement. However, a launch in May will depend on the schedule of other mission stations for space stations, the availability of the Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance and the Eastern Range spacecraft, the company added.
“The Starliner team has completed all work on the OFT-2 vehicle, except for activities to be carried out closer to launch, such as loading cargo and refilling the spacecraft,” Boeing said in the statement. “The team also submitted all the verification and validation paperwork to NASA and completed all recommended actions offered by Independent Review Team, including those that were not mandatory prior to OFT-2.”
Related: Boeing’s first Starliner spacecraft lands in New Mexico after shortened test flight
Following a first test flight in December 2019, during which Starliner was unable to reach the International Space Station, a review team at NASA identified 80 problems that Boeing had to fix, mostly in Starliner’s software. This failure delays the first crew flight test (CFT), which is scheduled for September at the earliest. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke will fly on the CFT mission.
The company’s engineers are currently conducting software simulations, including end-to-end confidence and integration tests that will serve as a mission dress rehearsal ahead of future Starliner flights. Boeing said it expects to complete all software testing in April.
The Starliner team is already preparing for CFT and recently hosted an exercise with astronauts boarding and climbing the OFT-2 spacecraft for a fully integrated and powered delivery of life-support and communication systems.
NASA’s commercial crew program awarded Boeing a $ 4.2 billion contract in 2014 to launch between two and six crew positions to the International Space Station on its new Starliner spacecraft. At the same time, SpaceX received a similar contract, worth $ 2.6 billion, to launch NASA astronauts on its Crew Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX is currently preparing to launch its second operational mission with astronauts, Crew-2, on Thursday (April 22). The company has already successfully completed an unmanned and a crew test flight to the space station on Crew Dragon. SpaceX’s first fully operational mission with four astronauts, called Crew-1, was launched to the station in November 2020 and will return to Earth on April 28.
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