CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA announced that the highly anticipated Boeing Starliner crew launch has been pushed back a month to April 2024.
Starliner, the crew capsule struggling with years of technical issues, still isn’t quite ready to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.
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“While Boeing is targeting March to have the spacecraft ready for flight, teams decided during a launch manifest evaluation that a launch in April will better accommodate upcoming crew rotations and cargo resupply missions this spring,” read a post on NASA’s commercial crew program blog.
Aastronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are set to be the first crewed mission of the spacecraft designed to take astronauts to and from the ISS.
News 6 reported in August that as Starliner’s first flight with astronauts continues to get delayed, Boeing is reporting $1.5 billion in losses for the program.
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Nine years ago, NASA awarded Boeing more than a billion dollars more than SpaceX to build spaceships capable of ending America’s dependence on Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.
In August, SpaceX launched its seventh full-length crew to the space station while Starliner in the last four years has only launched two uncrewed test flights, and they each had technical issues.
A set of parachutes is scheduled to be delivered and installed on the CFT spacecraft by the end of this year, according to NASA.
NASA also reported that the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station awaiting “integration with the spacecraft.”