Boeing and NASA announced on Sunday that their teams are gearing up to launch the new Starliner space capsule on June 5, following the scrub of its inaugural test flight launch attempt on Saturday.
The Starliner capsule had been prepared for lift-off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, but a ground system computer triggered an automatic abort command that halted the launch sequence.
NASA reported that teams worked through the night to evaluate the ground support equipment at the launch pad, which had encountered issues during the countdown. They identified a problem with a ground power supply within one of the chassis providing power to a subset of computer cards responsible for various system functions.
“The chassis containing the faulty ground power unit was removed, visually inspected, and replaced with a spare chassis,” the space agency stated.
The CST-200 Starliner’s first crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS), carrying two astronauts, remains a significant milestone for Boeing as the company strives to secure a larger portion of NASA’s business, currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Once launched, the Starliner is anticipated to reach the space station after approximately 24 hours of flight and dock with the orbiting research outpost located about 250 miles (402 km) above Earth.