Boeing’s launch of its Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission scheduled for Tuesday was scrubbed at the last minute due to an unexpected incident with the spacecraft, NASA said.
According to a statement from Boeing, “engineers monitoring the health and status of the vehicle detected unexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system. The issue was initially detected during checkouts following yesterday’s electrical storms in the region of Kennedy Space Center.”
The second test of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was scheduled to launch from the Florida coast Tuesday afternoon, reports ABC News, coming after the cancellation of last week’s launch due to a thruster-firing incident on the International Space Station (ISS).
As folks will remember, Boeing’s first launch of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in December 2019 did not go well, at all. It never reached the ISS but was recovered.
“Consequently, the launch of the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket will be postponed. The launch was scheduled for 1:20 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Aug. 3. Boeing and NASA teams are assessing the situation. The team will provide updates regarding a launch attempt on Wednesday, Aug. 4,” the company added in its statement.
Space station situation with Russian module misfire
ABC News mentioned the cancellation of last week’s launch was due to a thruster-firing incident on the International Space Station (ISS). But according to Space.com, the problem was more serious than originally reported.
Last Thursday, July 29, Russia’s research module, Nauka, docked with the ISS. But a few hours later, the module accidentally fired its thrusters, briefly tilting the space station and causing it to lose what engineers call “attitude control.”
NASA reported on Twitter that after that morning’s docking of the Nauka module to the ISS, the module’s thrusters started firing at 12:45 pm ET, inadvertently and unexpectedly moving the station 45 degrees out of attitude. NASA reported that recovery operations had regained attitude and the crew was in no danger:
However, that apparently is not the full story. The New York Times is reporting that Zebulon Scoville, the NASA flight director leading mission control in Houston during the event, says the station tilted far more severely than just 45 degrees. This incident was the first time that Scoville has ever declared a “spacecraft emergency.”
According to Scoville, the event has “been a little incorrectly reported.” He said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station “spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation,” according to the report.
On August 2, NASA representatives confirmed to Space.com that Scoville’s representation of the incident is accurate. “Those numbers representing the change in attitude are correct,” they said. “We’d reiterate that the maximum rate at which the change occurred was slow enough to go unnoticed by the crew members on board and all other station systems operated nominally during the entire event.”
To ensure that the situation with Nauka and the space station were stable before trying to dock another vehicle with the station, NASA and Boeing decided to postpone Starliner’s launch to Tuesday (Aug. 3). at 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT).
Now, we wait for the next launch.
