NASA might be making a crucial decision to cancel the Starliner .
The Boeing CST-100 Starliner is a two-spacecraft class planned to ferry personnel to the International Space Station (ISS) and other low-Earth orbit destinations.
The Boeing Starliner can carry a crew of up to seven people and is meant to stay docked to the International Space Station for up to seven months, with 10 missions of reusability.
NASA selected the Boeing Starliner, along with SpaceX Crew Dragon, for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract round in 2014, after multiple rounds of competitive development contracts within the Commercial Crew Program began in 2010.
Well, Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule is coming off the Atlas V rocket that was supposed to launch it to orbit for some “deeper-level troubleshooting” after more than a week of trying to address an issue with jammed valves.
NASA’s Steve Stich told reporters that Starliner won’t be able to fly to the International Space Station for a test trip until late October at the earliest.
Boeing had planned to launch Starliner on Aug. 3 in an effort to dock with the International Space Station, but the mission was postponed for the second time in less than a week.
Boeing wanted to use the forthcoming Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission to properly test its hardware and software before a crew of three American astronauts travel on Starliner.
Boeing and SpaceX are both members of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which aims to deliver people to the International Space Station from American soil.
For the time being, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, Michael Fincke, and Sunita Williams, who are presently assigned to the Crew Flight Test and Starliner-1 missions, are expected to continue on those manifests.
Boeing’s efforts to beat billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be the first to send NASA humans to the International Space Station from US territory in over a decade were highlighted by the Starliner capsule.
According to NASA, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has launched three crewed space station trips since 2020, with a fourth set to launch as soon as October 31.
Boeing has spent the better part of a year and a half addressing faults identified during NASA evaluations as part of the US space agency’s plan to secure self-sufficient access to the massive multinational research satellite orbiting 400 kilometers above Earth.
With so much to do on NASA’s to-do list, along with the reliable track record of working with SpaceX, it seems likely that NASA may cancel the adoption of the Starliner and end their contract with Boeing next year in favor of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
Because Mann will transition from the Starliner Crew Flight Test to the SpaceX Crew-5 mission in August, NASA anticipates the first Starliner crew trip will not take place until the second half of 2022, and there’s no assurance it will happen at that time.
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