Boeing delays first launch of Starliner manned spacecraft

Thursday, June 1, NASA and Boeing announcedthat the first manned flight of the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft will be delayed. The Starliner flight to the International Space Station with two astronauts on board was scheduled for June 21st. The flight was delayed after engineers discovered two technical problems with the Starliner: issues with the parachutes and the potential for electrical wiring in its internal systems to catch fire.

Starliner has been under development since 2014. The Starliner is one of several ships that NASA has ordered from private companies for its missions. In 2020, the first successful manned flight of the Crew Dragon, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, took place. Since then, Crew Dragon has repeatedly delivered astronauts to the ISS. “NASA is in desperate need of a second provider of crew transportation solutions,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial manned flight program manager, said Thursday, referring to Starliner.

Starliner launches repeatedly postponed due to various technical issues. Because of these delays, and because the NASA contract provides for a fixed initial project cost, Boeing lost $833 million in Starliner-related work over the past two years. The first test flight without astronauts in 2019 was interrupt. Finally last year passed successful unmanned Starliner flight and docking with the ISS. According to Mr. Stich, perhaps the first manned flight of the ship will be possible this fall, but this will depend on how quickly the current problems are resolved.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya