Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will have to wait for another day to fly to the International Space Station in an orbital capsule that has already faced years of costly technical delays.

NASA astronauts will have to wait until another day to launch to orbit in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. The planned launch was called off Monday night because of a problem in the Atlas V rocket that was to send them to space.

Engineers will work through the night to assess whether the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, can get back on the launchpad on Tuesday, or if repairs will be needed that could delay the flight by at least several days.

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Absolutely. But every vehicle platform scrubs, so there’s not a ton of point in speculating about the reliability of a brand-new launch vehicle based on one scrub. There’s a huge gulf between Soyuz and the Space Shuttle.

    • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      It didn’t help that the shuttle’s main engine fuel was hydrogen. Hydrogen plumbing plus Florida air equals rocket engineer headaches, and scrub after scrub after scrub. We saw it again in all those delays on the SLS test launch. And SLS is basically a space shuttle with different lego instructions.