In photos: Boeing's Starliner Orbital Test Flight 2 mission to the International Space Station.
The same tricky weather conditions that are worrying launch personnel also prompted the mission team to roll Starliner and its Atlas V rocket back inside from the launch pad, where it had arrived on Thursday (July 29) in preparation for a Friday (July 30) launch.Although weather conditions were also a concern for that launch date, the mission was postponed after the International Space Station spent about 45 minutes on Thursday out of its proper orientation when a software glitch caused thrusters on a newly arrived Russian science module to fire.
Whenever the capsule does blast off, the launch will begin a day-long trek to the International Space Station, where it will spend less than a week before returning to Earth to land in the western United States.
The launch, called Orbital Flight Test-2 or OFT-2, marks a crucial milestone for Boeing's Starliner system, which first attempted an uncrewed test flight to the space station in December 2019.A successful mission would pave the way for three NASA astronauts to launch later this year on a crewed flight test, which would in turn allow Boeing to begin regularly ferrying astronauts to orbit, as its competitor SpaceX has already begun doing with the Crew Dragon capsule.