The first manned flight of the new Boeing Starliner, which has been postponed many times, has been postponed once again. The Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission to the ISS was previously planned for mid-April, but now NASA and Boeing said the other day that it will start later.

CFT “It is now planned to launch [на] at the beginning of May in connection with the space station’s program”. The mission will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Space Force base at Cape Canaveral – the Starliner carrying astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will travel to the ISS for approximately ten days.

The test flight was planned to take place in July last year, but was prevented by technical problems: the Starliner’s parachute straps and fasteners not being strong enough, and flammable tape surrounding most of the wires in the capsule. At the end of January, NASA reported that the problems had been resolved and the launch was planned for mid-April. But the next obstacle was the ISS’s schedule.

Boeing is developing Starliner under a contract signed with NASA in September 2014. Two unmanned test flights were conducted before CFT. In December 2019, the spacecraft failed to dock with the ISS, but succeeded in doing so on the second attempt in May 2022. In September 2014, NASA also signed a contract with SpaceX for commercial human missions. Elon Musk’s company has already launched eight NASA missions to the ISS; the latest, Crew-8, was launched last Monday.