Manned test flight “Starliner” postponed again

NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams will take part in the weeklong flight, which was last scheduled for the spring. In May 2022, the ‘Starliner’ completed its first successful unmanned flight to the ISS and docked for four days.

Start “only planned at the beginning of May”
The mission to the ISS, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), was originally scheduled to begin in mid-April. As the American space agency NASA and the company Boeing, which builds the ‘Starliner’, announced in a press release on Friday, the launch was postponed – again. Due to the planning for the space station, it is only now “scheduled for early May”, it is said.

The test flight would actually have taken place in July last year. Due to technical problems – including with the suspension lines of the Starliner’s main parachutes and the fact that much of the space capsule’s wiring was wrapped in flammable tape – the launch was postponed until this spring.

These problems are under control, NASA said in an update at the end of January, which emphasized at the time that the launch of the CFT was still planned for mid-April this year. But the ISS’s schedule can also change its schedule, as Friday’s news proves.

Project way behind schedule
In the future, Boeing’s ‘Starliner’ will transport astronauts to the human outpost in space as an alternative to SpaceX’s ‘Crew Dragon’ space capsule. However, due to a number of problems, the project is far behind schedule.

Then NASA, which halted its Space Shuttle program in 2011, would no longer have to rely on Russian “Soyuz” capsules in this area.