1 of 3 | The first crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule was scrubbed Monday night, with two astronauts on board and just hours before launch, over concerns about an oxygen relief valve. The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launch with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft aboard on the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida will be rescheduled. Handout photo by NASA/Joel Kowsky/EPA-EFE
May 6 (UPI) — The first crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule was scrubbed Monday night two hours before launch over concerns about an oxygen relief valve. The launch was canceled “over an abundance of caution” after the two astronauts had been strapped inside the capsule atop the Atlas V rocket.
“ULA Launch Director Tom Heter III has made the decision to the launch team that launch operations will not continue tonight for Atlas V and Starliner,” United Launch Alliance wrote Monday in a post on X at 8:34 p.m. EDT.
“Today’s Starliner launch is scrubbed as teams evaluate an oxygen relief valve on the Centaur Stage on the Atlas V. Our astronauts have exited Starliner and will return to crew quarters,” NASA announced Monday night in a post on X.
Boeing’s Starliner was scheduled to launch at 10:34 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, for a 10-day test flight to certify the spacecraft for future manned missions.
Astronauts Suni Williams, 58, and Butch Wilmore, 61, were already strapped into the Starliner capsule, when the launch was called off. The Starliner was scheduled to travel to the International Space Station and back to Earth.
Earlier, with just hours to go before the scrubbed launch, Williams and Wilmore exited NASA’s Operations and Checkout Building at 7:16 p.m. EDT for their ride to Space Launch Complex-41, as friends, family and colleagues gathered outside to celebrate their send-off.
After arriving at the launchpad in the Starliner Astrovan, Wilmore boarded the spacecraft for the long process of being strapped in, followed by Williams, as they underwent “a series of checks, including umbilical hook ups, communications checks and suit checks,” Boeing Space wrote in a post on X, that showed the astronauts inside the spacecraft.
There has been no announcement at this time about rescheduling the launch for Starliner’s test flight.
If in the next few days or week when Starliner launches, the capsule will break away from the Atlas V rocket within 24 hours and fire its own engines to travel to the space station.
“They’re checking out a lot of the systems: the life support, the manual control,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters Friday. “That’s why we put two test pilots on board — and of course the resumes of Butch and Suni are extensive.”
Wilmore and Williams, who are U.S. Navy-trained test pilots and helped develop the Starliner capsule, will use the mission to make sure all systems on board work as planned in order to certify the spacecraft for future manned missions.
“This has been a developmental process where we’ve been involved and ensconced in that process,” Wilmore said during a virtual news conference Wednesday.
“All the way from hardware and software evaluations in the simulator, we’ve got our fingerprints on every single procedure in this process,” he added. “That’s what the test process is.”
“Our mission is primarily a test mission to check out flying the spacecraft to the space station, docking and then checking it out while it’s docked to ensure it can be a safe haven that can remain docked for a number of months,” Williams said, adding that the goal is to ensure successful missions in the future with Starliner designed to spend up to seven months docked at the International Space Station.
“This is our opportunity to lay that groundwork, so in the future, we hope people won’t ask why we did it one way or another,” she said. “We want to make it as best as possible for future missions. We are the ones working with the engineering team to make all of that happen.”
Both Wilmore and Williams have already spent six months on the International Space Station, using space shuttle and Soyuz missions to get to the orbiting space laboratory.
Once launched, the astronauts will navigate and test Starliner before docking at the space station. They will return to Earth days later in the same capsule, which will parachute down to a landing in the southwestern United States.
