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DannyB [soylentnews.org] writes:

Starliner launch delayed to mid-May [spacenews.com]

The first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner will be delayed at least another week and a half to replace a faulty valve in its Atlas 5 launch vehicle.

NASA announced late May 7 that the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, whose launch was scrubbed May 6 because of a malfunctioning valve in the rocket’s Centaur upper stage, [spacenews.com] had been rescheduled for no earlier than May 17 at 6:16 p.m. Eastern.

[....] The lengthy delay will allow United Launch Alliance to roll the rocket back to its Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) hangar

[....] Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said the concern was that the vibration could have caused the valve to approach its rated life of 200,000 cycles. The valve was vibrating at 40 hertz, he noted.

He said then that engineers would examine if those vibrations involved full cycles of the valve. If so, then ULA would have to replace the valve. [...]

[....] The two astronauts flying the CFT mission, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will remain at the Kennedy Space Center in pre-flight quarantine for this latest delay, NASA said.

It's good that they caught a problem like this.

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