Saturday’s launch attempt of the long-awaited inaugural astronaut mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was called off minutes before liftoff. Follow for our live updates.
The scrub occurred after an automatic hold triggered by the computer that launches the rocket stopped the countdown clock.
“I remember back in the shuttle days we would play this game of getting ready for launch and then scrubbing and then coming back and getting the mission done,” Fincke said. “And I think over time, we won’t remember today, or May 6, so much because we’re going to have a great launch in our future.”Mission teams are working to understand what caused an automatic hold of Starliner’s launch minutes before liftoff and focusing on safely extracting the crew.
There is no indication yet as to what caused the hold, but the countdown clock remains at four minutes to launch. Check out how Starliner might function as a “safe haven” — a place for astronauts to hide if something goes wrong on the space station — while it’s docked thereNASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, right, and Suni Williams speak to the media at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25.Williams and Wilmore have taken a measured approach when responding to questions about the Starliner spacecraft’s development woes.
“We always find stuff — and we are going to continually find stuff,” she said. “Everything’s not going to be absolutely perfect as we fly the spacecraft.” Rather than making a replacement to fix the leak, the teams decided that the helium leak is small enough to be manageable, Stich said. There is a contingency supply of generic clothes and toiletries on the space station that the astronaut duo will use instead for their short stay, Weigel said.With this flight, Suni Williams, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1998, will make a bit of history as the mission’s pilot. Few women have joined the first flight of a new spacecraft.That came after she ran the Boston Marathon from the space station in 2007.
Williams has traveled to space twice before, once on a NASA space shuttle in 2006 and again on a Russian Soyuz capsule in 2012. She’s logged 322 total days in space.For Starliner’s debut launch, NASA is sticking with a long tradition of staffing the novel spacecraft with astronauts who have previously trained as military test pilots: Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore.
As an astronaut, Wilmore has already logged 178 days in space during two separate missions and conducted four spacewalks.Wilmore said that, during the spacewalk, he was surprised to find that a radiator on the space station’s exterior was reflective, like a mirror. After evaluating the issue, which prevented the hatch from closing after the astronauts entered the crew capsule for about 45 minutes, mission teams switched to a redundant system for the valve data.Fortunately, mission teams were ahead of the expected timeline when the issue occurred, and the countdown to launch has resumed, according to the live NASA broadcast. And the issue never posed a threat to crew safety.
The mission teams also took a close look at Starliner’s parachutes after one parachute on Blue Origin’s recent suborbital crewed flight failed to fully inflate. Starliner uses components that are similar to that parachute system, Stich said.
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