The long-delayed first crew mission of Boeing's new Starliner capsule has been pushed back again.
That mission to the International Space Station (ISS), known as the Crew Flight Test (CFT), is tentatively scheduled to begin in mid-April. But that's no longer the plan, NASA and Boeing announced Friday (March 8).
CFT is “currently scheduled to launch [in] in early May due to space station scheduling,” agency officials wrote Update Friday afternoon.
Related: Boeing's 1st Starliner flight with astronauts delayed to April 2024
The CFT will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. It will send the Starliner and NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS for a stay of about 10 days.
The test flight was scheduled to begin last July. However, technical problems—notably, a problem with the suspension lines in the Starliner's main parachutes and the capsule's wiring being covered in flammable tape—raised this spring.
Those issues are under control, NASA said in an update in late January, which emphasized that the CFD was still on track for a mid-April launch. But ISS transit problems can also change the tables, as Friday's news attests.
Boeing is developing the Starliner under a multibillion-dollar contract the company signed with NASA in September 2014. The capsule has been launched on two uncrewed test flights to date, both of which targeted the ISS.
Starliner experienced several problems on its maiden flight in December 2019, and failed to rendezvous with the orbiting lab as scheduled. The capsule succeeded in its second attempt, lifting off in May 2022.
NASA awarded SpaceX a commercial team contract in September 2014. Elon Musk's company has now launched eight operational space missions to the ISS for NASA, the most recent of which, dubbed Crew-8, lifted off on Sunday (March 3).
