CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Boeing’s much-anticipated first spaceflight of its Starliner spacecraft with humans onboard, which was scheduled for Monday night, will be delayed until late next week as crews work to replace a malfunctioning valve on the rocket, NASA said Tuesday evening.
Earlier in the day, NASA had said it was hoping to launch Friday. But in the evening statement, the agency said that it needed more time and that after “assessing the risks relative to continued use, the ULA team determined the valve exceeded its qualification and mission managers agreed to remove and replace the valve.”
Tory Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing that operates the Atlas V rocket, said during a briefing Monday night that the valve that malfunctioned regulates pressure inside a liquid oxygen tank on the rocket’s second stage. It helps keep the flow of propellants into the stage’s two engines as well as maintain the structural integrity of the tank.
GET CAUGHT UP
The valve was “buzzing,” Bruno said, opening and closing at a fast rate. Engineers were trying to determine how much energy the valve had expended while doing so.
On Monday, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore had already taken their seats inside the capsule that sits atop the ULA Atlas V rocket here and were waiting to blast off two hours before the 10:34 p.m. launch time when officials from NASA, Boeing and the ULA did not like how the valve was behaving and decided to call off the launch.
Leading up to the mission, NASA said that the safety of the astronauts is the highest priority and that authorities would not hesitate to order a delay if they saw anything amiss that could threaten the mission.
“We’re taking it one step at a time, and we’re going launch [when] we’re ready and fly when it’s safe to do so,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said at the Monday briefing.
Starliner has wound a troubled path to finally begin to fly humans, a series of setbacks that have cost Boeing $1.4 billion and delayed the program by years. But this time, the problem was not with the capsule, but rather the Atlas V rocket, which has been a reliable workhorse that traces its heritage to the Mercury program. Scrubs, however, are common in spaceflight, and valves, which are used to regulate the flow of propellants, are often particularly nettlesome.
“We have spare valves,” Bruno said. “We know how to do it. We’ve done it before, but it would take several days. And so we would coordinate … with our partners at NASA and Boeing and then we have a date for you pretty soon, but I can’t tell you that right now because we’re still working it.”
The planned flight is a test mission — the first launch with humans strapped into Starliner — to see how the spacecraft operates in space with a crew on board. If the capsule is able to successfully complete the flight and the gantlet of tasks associated with it, NASA would certify it for regular missions carrying a full crew of four astronauts to the space station, which has been continuously inhabited for more than 20 years.
Once the crew came off the rocket, engineers sent a command to the valve to close, and it did, which fixed the problem, he said. If the rocket were launching a satellite, and not humans, they would have proceeded to launch, Bruno said, but they stood down out of an abundance of caution.
NASA and Boeing are eager to launch and certify Starliner for regular flights, which would give NASA a second American spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to orbit. SpaceX holds the other contract from NASA and has been flying astronauts to the station since 2020.
