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May 19, 2022 • 35 minutes ago • 3 minutes of reading • Join the conversation
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CAPE CANAVER – Boeing’s new Starliner capsule was launched on Thursday during an unmanned test flight to the International Space Station to ensure the company’s much-needed success after more than two years of delays and costly engineering failures.
The dripping CST-100 Starliner launched just before 7pm EDT (2300 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida, carried on top of an Atlas V rocket provided by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance (ULA). ).
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About 30 minutes after takeoff, the Starliner reached its intended pre-orbit after separating from the upper Atlas V rocket and flying with its own power to a trajectory for a later encounter with the space station.
It was at this point in Starliner’s previous test flight at the end of 2019 that a software problem effectively thwarted the spacecraft’s ability to reach the space station.
If all goes according to plan, the capsule will arrive at the station in about 24 hours and dock with the research post into orbit about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth on Friday night.
The Boeing must spend four to five days attached to the space station before disconnecting and flying back to Earth, with an airbag cushioned parachute landing on the desert floor of White Sands, New Mexico.
A successful mission will move the long-delayed Starliner one step closer to providing NASA with a second reliable means of transporting astronauts to and from the space station.
After resuming crew flights into orbit from the United States in 2020, nine years after the end of the space shuttle program, the U.S. space agency had to rely solely on Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules to NASA astronauts are flying.
Previously, the only other way to reach the orbital laboratory was by boarding the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
“Having a backup is important for the country,” NASA chief Bill Nelson told Reuters hours before takeoff.
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Thursday’s launch also comes at a crucial time for Boeing, as the Chicago-based company tries to emerge from successive crises in its jet business and space defense business. The Starliner program alone forced Boeing to charge $ 595 million after the failure of its first unmanned test flight into orbit in 2019.
USEFUL LOAD AND PASSENGER MODEL
Starliner did not fly into orbit empty. The capsule carried a research dummy bizarrely called the Rosie Rocket to collect data on the crew’s cabin conditions during the voyage, plus a £ 500 payload to the space station crew – three NASA astronauts, an astronaut from the European Space Agency in Italy and three Russian astronauts
Two of the American astronauts will have the task of boarding the capsule during Starliner’s stay to take measurements of the internal environment and unload supplies.
The launch on Thursday marked a repeat of a 2019 test mission that failed to meet successfully with the space station due to a malfunction of flight software. Subsequent problems with the Starliner propulsion system supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne prompted Boeing to eliminate an attempt to launch the capsule last summer.
The spacecraft remained on Earth for another nine months as the two companies debated what caused the closure of its fuel valves and which company was responsible for repairing them, Reuters reported last week.
Boeing says it has since resolved the issue with a temporary solution and plans to revamp the propulsion system’s fuel valves after the flight this week.
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Starliner was developed under a $ 4.5 billion fixed-price contract by NASA to provide the US space agency with a second low-Earth orbit, along with SpaceX.
If the second unmanned voyage to orbit succeeds, Starliner could fly with his first team of astronauts in the fall, although NASA officials warn that the time period may be postponed.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Mike Finke were assigned to fly on Starliner’s first manned mission. But NASA officials, who are reluctant to tie two astronauts to a flight whose launch date is uncertain, said Wednesday that the mission could carry at least two of each of the four astronauts currently training for the Starliner test. (Report by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida; additional reports by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Gary Doyle and Grant McCool)
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