Weather concerns remain as NASA and Boeing have tried starliner Capsule in a bio-drone test flight for International Space Station On Tuesday (August 3).
The launch is scheduled for 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT), and current weather patterns are favourable, according to 45 . Weather Relay, which monitors launch conditions from the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Station. According to the company’s current forecast, there is a 40% chance that the weather will allow the launch on Tuesday.
Squadron officials wrote in A Opinion Released on Saturday 31 July. “However, a weather-related violation is possible due to scattered rain and thunderstorms in the area, especially towards the end of the count.”
Related: Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight 2 test: Live updates
in the pictures: Boeing’s Starliner Orbital Test Flight 2 mission to the International Space Station
In particular, the office monitors cumulus cloud formation, surface electric fields, and potential illumination hazard.
The same difficult weather conditions that worried the launch crew also caused the mission team to drive around in a Starliner and its Atlas V rocket. inside From the launch pad he arrived on Thursday (July 29) in preparation for release on Friday (July 30). While weather conditions are also a concern for this launch date, the mission was delayed after the International Space Station slipped out of alignment by about 45 minutes on Thursday, when Program error Crank the engines of the newly arrived Russian science unit.
If Starliner can’t start on Tuesday, the next opportunity will be on Wednesday (August 4). When the capsule is launched, the launch begins a full-day journey to the International Space Station, where you’ll spend less than a week before returning to Earth for a landing in the western United States.
The beginning is called Orbital Flight Test-2 or OFT-2, a turning point in Boeing’s Starliner system, which in December 2019 performed an unmanned test flight to the space station for the first time. However, due to a series of setbacks, the capsule failed to reach the orbiting laboratory and returned to Earth without completing its main mission: to demonstrate that the system was ready to transport astronauts.
Nineteen months later, the Starliner is ready to retry the flight after implementing 80 recommendations from NASA and Boeing regarding the failed flight. The successful mission will pave the way for three NASA astronauts to launch a manned flight test later this year, which in turn will allow Boeing to regularly put astronauts into orbit, as rival SpaceX has already done. manned kite capsule.
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