The seemingly star-cross Boeing Starliner — within minutes of its long-delayed blastoff on the spacecraft’s first piloted test flight — was grounded again Saturday when one of three redundant computers managing the countdown from the base of the launch pad ran into a problem, triggering a last-minute scrub.
An Atlas 5 rocket carrying astronauts for the first time was fueled for blastoff Monday night to boost Boeing’s long-delayed Starliner crew ferry ship into orbit for its first piloted test flight. But trouble with a valve in the rocket’s upper stage forced mission managers to order a scrub just two hours before takeoff.
Years behind schedule and more than a billion dollars over budget, Boeing’s Starliner capsule is finally poised for its first piloted launch Monday, a critical test flight carrying two veteran astronauts to the International Space Station and in so doing, demonstrate an alternative to SpaceX’s already operational Crew Dragon.
Three NASA astronauts and a cosmonaut blasted off on a flight to the International Space Station Sunday, the first of two launches by NASA and the Russian space agency to replace five of the lab’s seven crew members and to deliver a fresh Soyuz ferry ship for two cosmonauts midway through a yearlong flight.
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