NASA and Boeing Postpone Launch of Starliner Spacecraft

Two years ago, Boeing appeared to be on track to be the first to be ready to put astronauts on board.

About all that remained was a demonstration flight with no astronauts on board, which launched in December 2019. Embarrassingly, things went wrong almost immediately, exposing flawed software, and calling to mind problems that Boeing’s aviation division had with the 737 Max jet, which led to a pair of fatal crashes.

Not only was Starliner not ready for astronauts, but it took Boeing more than a year to analyze what went wrong, rewrite its software and validate that the spacecraft would be trustworthy.

Why was the launch delayed last week?

This is actually the second delay in a week: Starliner was scheduled to launch on Friday. But then events in orbit around Earth intervened.

Russia had launched a new space station module, Nauka, which successfully docked Thursday morning. But then Nauka’s thrusters inadvertently started firing again, pushing the International Space Station into a spin, revolving around one and a half times before controllers got it back under control after about an hour.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-launch.html