Washington
Actually, the spaceship should soon deliver two astronauts to the ISS. But the date is postponed again – there are technical problems.
Another setback for the crisis-ridden spaceship “Starliner”: Due to new technical problems, a first manned test flight to the International Space Station ISS has to be postponed, as the US space agency Nasa and the US aircraft manufacturer Boeing announced at a press conference on Thursday. There are problems with the parachute system and a strap on a cable connector that turned out to be flammable. The representatives of Nasa and Boeing did not want to say whether the test flight could take place this year.
The “Starliner” should actually have started on July 21 at the earliest with the Nasa astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams on board to the ISS and stayed there for about a week. This date had also been postponed several times before.
In May 2022, the “Starliner” completed a successful unmanned flight to the ISS for the first time and spent four days there – an important test for the spacecraft. In the future, it will transport astronauts to the ISS as an alternative to SpaceX’s “Crew Dragon” space capsule. However, the project is well behind schedule due to a number of issues.