NASA was going to send Boeing’s unmanned Starliner spacecraft atop an Atlas V rocket up today but the Russians screwed it up.
Russia’s Nauka space module was scheduled to dock with supplies for the International Space Station today. The Nauka, Russian for “science,” is going to be Russia’s primary space lab, and had a rough flight to the space station but then ran into trouble docking. As the cosmonauts on the station were about to open the hatch the module’s rockets fired. Oops. No one was hurt and the docking was successfully completed, but checking everything for safety means NASA will have to wait.
The Starliner is NASA’s version of a new resuable rocket. The private businesses of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have grabbed all the headlines lately, but NASA has been working with Boeing on their own reusable low earth orbit spacecraft that will be used to take astronauts to and from the space station. Today was going to be the second of three planned test flights before trying it with people aboard. There were minor issues with the first that they are hoping to correct with the second and perfect by the third.
The next window for NASA to launch is Tuesday, August 3 at 12:20 pm Houston time.
photo: Getty Images