United States: Boeing has cancelled the first crewed flight of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft due to a rocket valve malfunction that was discovered by engineers.
About an hour after the two NASA astronauts had buckled into the spacecraft and two hours before the planned liftoff on Monday, the launch was cancelled.
During a live NASA webcast, the postponement, which was attributed to a valve issue with the Atlas V rocket, was disclosed.
“Standing down on tonight’s attempt to launch. As I’ve said before, @NASA’s first priority is safety. We go when we’re ready,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said in a post on X.
The problem’s duration was not immediately apparent, although the launch’s next potential launch windows are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were scheduled to be transported by Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS), where they were to spend a week before making their way back to Earth.
A lot of people have been watching the Starliner’s first trip to the ISS to see if Boeing can compete with SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, for NASA contracts.
In 2014, NASA gave Boeing and SpaceX multibillion-dollar contracts to create spacecraft that the agency would use to launch astronauts and supplies into orbit.
With the conclusion of the space shuttle program, NASA began to move toward public-private partnerships with the signing of these contracts.
In 2020, SpaceX’s Dragon successfully launched humans to the ISS, the first time that US land had hosted a NASA astronaut in a commercial spacecraft.
After a failed attempt three years prior, Starliner made its maiden unmanned flight to the ISS in 2022.
The cancellation of Monday’s launch coincides with a challenging moment for Boeing, as the corporation is facing multiple investigations into purported safety violations at its aviation branch.
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