It took a little extra time for Boeing’s uncrewed Starliner capsule to dock with the International Space Station for the first time, with NASA …
It took a little extra time for Boeing’s uncrewed Starliner capsule to dock with the International Space Station for the first time, with NASA mission control announcing the spacecraft officially docked with the ISS at 5:28 PT on Friday. The milestone came a little over an hour later than initially expected and more than two years since Starliner’s last attempt to reach the orbiting laboratory. The astronauts living on the station will open the hatch to Starliner on Saturday and unload the shipment of food and other cargo inside. The capsule is set to spend several days attached to the ISS before returning to Earth. The capsule launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 3:54 p.m. PT Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission is referred to as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) because Starliner’s first attempt at an OFT in 2019 saw the conical craft fail to reach the ISS due to a software glitch. The vehicle did manage to land back on Earth, but a NASA safety advisory panel later revealed that a second software problem was corrected in midflight that had « the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure.
