The first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft to the ISS was delayed due to a malfunction

The failure occurred in a valve on the second (upper) stage of the Atlas V launch vehicle that was supposed to launch the spacecraft into orbit, the rocket’s maker, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance (ULA), said.

“The culprit is a problem with the oxygen valve on the Centaur stage (the second stage of the Atlas V rocket – editor’s note). The crew is leaving the cabin of the spacecraft,” added Michal Václavík, an expert in cosmonautics from the Czech Space Agency and Czech Technical University in Prague, on the X network last night. The rocket was supposed to launch at 4:34 a.m. CEST on Tuesday.

“NASA’s priority is safety,” Bill Nelson, head of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), immediately responded to ULA’s statement.

A module with three astronauts landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan

World

According to Nelson, the launch will take place “as soon as we are ready”.

No date for the new start has been announced yet, AFP noted. According to Reuters, the long-awaited first test flight of the new Starliner module has been delayed “by at least 24 hours”.

If successful, the American manufacturer of aerospace technology would get a chance to compete with SpaceX, which has so far provided all astronaut launches from home for the American space program.

Among other things, the astronauts’ task during the first test flight will be to test the manual controls of the craft, which is otherwise designed for fully automatic flight. The astronauts are scheduled to stay on the ISS for about a week before returning to Earth and landing by parachute in the desert of the southwestern United States.

The mission, whose cost over the years of development and after years of test flight delays exceeded the established budget by more than a billion dollars, is a preliminary step to the approval of the spacecraft for regular commercial flights.

Boeing, facing numerous crises in the aviation sector, is trying to compete with SpaceX and its Crew Dragon module with the Starliner. As of 2020, this is the only means of getting NASA astronauts into orbit from American territory.

The Starliner spacecraft has returned to Earth

America

The first unmanned test flight in 2019 failed to put the Starliner into the correct orbit and thus did not even dock with the ISS. Later, the manufacturer had to deal with problems with parachutes, which slowed down the landing of the ship.

The American space agency NASA is trying to create a broad portfolio of private companies that will carry astronauts into space for it. Commercial vessels will transport crews not only to the ISS, but in the future as part of the Artemis program to the Moon and finally, according to the most ambitious plans, to Mars.

The first non-American citizen on the moon will be Japanese, Biden announced

Science and schools