Starliner test flight scheduled for July 30 - SpaceNews

WASHINGTON — NASA and Boeing have scheduled a second uncrewed test flight of the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew spacecraft for July 30.

In separate statements, the agency and the company said they were planning to launch the Starliner on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 at 2:53 p.m.

The new launch date comes after NASA and Boeing completed an “integrated mission dress rehearsal” for the mission using a simulator at a Boeing facility in Houston.

“It provided another opportunity to run the software end to end with the highest-fidelity hardware and mission controllers in the loop to simulate as close to an actual flight as possible,” John Vollmer, Starliner vice president and program manager at Boeing, said in a company statement.

“The traffic model up there on ISS is something else,” Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, said during a Space Transportation Association presentation May 6 when mentioning the status of the OFT-2 mission, shortly before the NASA and Boeing statements about the new launch date.

NASA and Boeing are holding out hope that, if OFT-2 does launch this summer, it can still fly the CFT mission with three NASA astronauts on board before the end of the year.