Miami, May 6 (EFE).- The launch of Boeing's first crewed space mission was canceled on Monday when there were about two hours remaining before lift-off to the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral, in Florida (USA). .
NASA stated that the reason for the cancellation was due to a malfunction in one of the valves of the Atlas 5 launch rocket, belonging to the private company United Launch Alliance (ULA), on which the Boeing Starliner ship was installed.
The decision to cancel today's liftoff was made by ULA's launch director, Tom Hetter III, and according to the US space agency, teams will inspect one of the Atlas V's oxygen valves, where the technical failure apparently occurred.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who confirmed the cancellation in this way, said: “NASA's first priority is safety. We will go when we are ready.”
The Starliner vehicle was scheduled to lift off tonight at 10:34 pm local time (2:34 GMT on Wednesday), from the launch complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying two NASA astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams. .
Neither NASA nor the private company has yet announced a possible new launch date.
The Boeing CFT (Crew Flight Test) mission aims to obtain the necessary certifications from NASA to be able to start working as a second provider for transporting crew and cargo to the so-called orbital laboratory, a service that it has been officially providing since 2020. SpaceX.
The US Space Agency has granted Boeing about $4.2 billion since 2014 until now to achieve this goal, so expectations were high today at Cape Canaveral.
In the same time period, SpaceX has received $2.6 billion, and its Dragon capsule has already made more than a dozen trips to the International Space Station, differences that were pointed out today by its CEO, Pole Elon Musk, who in a message on X, hours ago during liftoff The rapporteur, offered a possible explanation: “There are too many non-technical managers at Boeing.”
Today's cancellation is added to the series of setbacks recorded by the Starliner vehicle, which was able to fly to the International Space Station on the first experimental mission, without a crew, in May 2022, after two failed attempts in 2019 and 2021.
Facing its first manned mission, there was no shortage of setbacks to which Boeing was exposed, which had set the launch date for this mission on July 21, 2023, but the discovery of some malfunctions in the parachute system and in some insulating fiberglass tapes forced it to be postponed with a month and a half remaining.
“I can say with complete confidence that the teams have done their due diligence,” NASA associate administrator James Frey said last week during a conference call in which he explained his confidence in the success of the mission that had to be carried out. I took off today.
Frye added that the CFT is a test flight, and therefore, astronauts and space observers expected unexpected events to occur. Evie
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