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.

  • Rx_Hawk [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    17·
    6 months ago

    Since June 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 339 times, with 337 full mission successes, two failures…

    Falcon family boosters have successfully landed 303 times in 314 attempts. A total of 42 boosters have flown multiple missions, with a record of 20 missions by a booster.

    Reusable rockets have been a massive advancement in space flight, should just be operated by governmental agencies, not private companies.

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

      Absolutely agreed. I think it’s possible to both loathe the jackass who owns SpaceX, and also to appreciate the top-tier R&D being done by all those engineers and scientists and technicians who are doing the real work there. They’re the people who just launched the most powerful rocket ever built to put the biggest spaceship ever built into near-orbit. (And the only reason they didn’t put Starship in a real orbit was to make absolutely certain it would never be a debris hazard even if they lost control.)