It seems like this is again not Starliner’s week, as NASA and Boeing pushing the launch of the first crewed Starliner spaceflight back from the May 25th launch date. The new launch date is no earlier than June 1, one week later. However what is going on with Starliner is less than clear.
It seems like every time Starliner gets ready to launch, something doesn’t want to go right for the spacecraft. While the scrub earlier this month was due to a valve on ULA‘s Centaur upper stage, that is now fixed, and Starliner is very much the problem now.
On Tuesday, NASA informed the press and the public that Boeing would not attempt to launch NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on June 25 as planned. However, they did not give a new launch date or information as to how Starliner is doing.
Miraculously, a new update yesterday both from Boeing and NASA gave us a launch date of June 1 and detailed that work is still ongoing on the helium leak on Starliner’s service module. The update also noted work on a “follow-on propulsion system assessment to understand potential helium system impacts on some Starliner return scenarios.”
NASA and Boeing will also complete a new test flight readiness review before launching.
Boeing works very differently that SpaceX. As an “old space” company they usually are much more thorough and cautious when it comes to any issue found in their system. This leads to long reviews and slow moves to make any changes to any system.
Boeing also doesn’t have a CEO who fires teams as a whole when the don’t do what he wants.
However, this also screams to me that something much larger than just a helium leak. Boeing has pretty much lost trust with the press over lack of timely updates and specifically not sharing additional issues with Starliner during the ill-fated OFT-1 mission.
So if you asked me how likely that June 1 launch date is for CFT, I wouldn’t be planning to be in Florida on that day. They do, however, have additional launch dates for June 2, 5, and 6.
