After nearly 2 1/2 years, NASA and Boeing want to hit the target this time with their new and improved CST-100 Starliner on a redo of its uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station.
The new Starliner capsule is scheduled to lift off atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:54 p.m. today on what’s dubbed Orbital Flight Test-2.
The Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 weather squadron in its Wednesday forecast predicted a 70% chance for good weather for the attempt with afternoon showers and thunderstorms the primary concern. The weather looks like it would not cooperate for a backup opportunity Friday, with only a 30% chance for good conditions.
Starliner tried the trip once before in December 2019. But communication and software issues caused a major misstep in Boeing’s plans to join SpaceX as one of two partners in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. The capsule launched and landed safely, but it never made it to the ISS.
SpaceX has since surged ahead flying humans to the ISS for the first time in its Crew Dragon in May 2020 and is in the midst of its fourth operational flight to the station.
Starliner had been on pace with SpaceX before the 2019 setback, an incident NASA referred to as a “high visibility close call” that led to a post-launch review calling for 80 changes to the program. After nearly 18 months of fixes, Boeing was back last August for a retry. But that attempt was foiled when moisture caused corrosion on several valves, and Starliner was delayed another nine months.
Now, with new hardware in place and issues resolved, the spacecraft can finally finish the job, which is being done at no cost to NASA since it’s a reflight. If all goes as planned, the Starliner will dock with the ISS on Friday at 7:10 p.m. and could return to Earth as early as May 25.
Kathryn Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate, though, tempered expectations, reiterating that the flight remains a test flight.
“We’re going through this as a demonstration mission,” she said. “We learned a lot from the first uncrewed demo. We’re going to learn a lot from the second one. ... So we’ll all learn. We’re going to take this one step at a time. I think you guys may be tired of me saying that.”
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