NASA officials have announced that the SpaceX Crew-10 launch, once slated for February, has been delayed until March.
As a result, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose jaunt to the International Space Station was originally supposed to see them back home in a matter of days, now won’t be home for Valentine’s Day either.
Boeing was slated to have completed Starliner’s crewed test flight by 2017, but the vehicle, dubbed “Calypso” by its crew, didn’t rumble off the launchpad in Florida until last summer.
By then the program was already more than $1.5 billion over budget, a reality that must have been even harder to stomach when the spacecraft suffered technical issues during its trip to the ISS.
Initially officials tried to downplay the reality that five of its 28 thrusters (which help the astronauts steer) failed to fire and that the one helium leak Starliner had taken off with had turned into several.
But while they continued to issue statements of full confidence in Starliner’s ability to make its return journey without incident, officials tucked in the fact that they were pushing back the timeline for when Williams, the crew pilot, and Williams, the crew commander, would clamber back into Starliner for their return flight home.
In August, NASA finally called it, announcing that Boeing’s Starliner would conduct its return flight sans crew while the crew would be hitching a ride home on competitor SpaceX’s Crew-Dragon. Williams and Wilmore joined Crew-9, who arrived in September, for a routine ISS mission that was scheduled to fly home no earlier than February, once the team had handed things off to their replacements on Crew-10.
NASA reshuffled their crew plans to ensure that there’d be seats for Williams and Wilmore aboard Crew-9’s return flight.
However, SpaceX’s Crew-10 launch has now been delayed a month to give the folks at SpaceX and NASA time to look over and prepare a new Crew Dragon vehicle, due to arrive at SpaceX’s processing facility to be prepped for launch in January.
