Boeing Delays Space Taxi’s First ISS Mission Until Late 2018

According to Aviation Week, Boeing's CS-100 Starliner would not be carrying the astronauts to the ISS before December 2018. The aerospace corporation was expected to help in ending NASA's dependence on Russia's known rocket organization, Soyuz rockets by 2017. However, in May this year, Boeing announced that its space taxi won't be ready for flight until mid-2018. Now, the historic flight needs to be delayed further due to some manufacturing issues.

Boeing had to discard one of the major structural elements of Starliner because of a design flaw. The company went through various difficulties while manufacturing the most complex components of the spacecraft. The program manager for Starliner, John Mulholland said that those difficulties had already been worked upon by his team but they took few months longer than the expected time. "When we were faced with these issues it was time for us to step back and say: 'Hey listen, we have to readdress [this] and say what's real and lay in where we are going forward'," he explained.

As a result of this, the unmanned orbital flight that was initially going to take off in December 2017 has now been scheduled for June 2018. Starliner's first manned mission that was set to launch in February 2018 now would not take place until August 2018. NASA was not surprised by this announcement though: the Office of Inspector General of the space agency had spotted some issues with the development of both the SpaceX's Dragon 2 capsule and the Starliner. The office had published a report recently stating that it does not expect any of the companies to be able to ferry the astronauts to the ISS before 2018.

NASA had engaged both Boeing and SpaceX to manufacture space taxis that would carry its astronauts to the orbit back in the year 2012. The mission then aimed for a 2015 launch which was quite unrealistic. SpaceX's Elon Musk is yet to reveal whether it also has any plans of pushing its first manned mission further. If not, it will be able to send the astronauts to ISS in 2017. But it is expected of SpaceX to push its launch date further away due to the fact that one of its Falcon 9 rockets blew up in September on the launch pad itself.