The Boeing Starliner, which was scheduled to send Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams on her third space mission, was aborted today due to a technical fault. So far, no new date has been set for the launch.
Williams was scheduled to launch her next space mission on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 8.04 a.m. on a brand-new Boeing Starliner spaceship.
However, the Atlas V rocket’s launch was cancelled about 90 minutes before liftoff.
The two-member NASA crew who were meant to travel on this trip, astronauts Barry Wilmore (61) and Sunita Williams (58), were strapped into their seats aboard the Starliner spaceship, an hour before launch activities were halted.
Following the event, the US space agency NASA confirmed that the mission was cancelled due to a problem with a valve in the rocket’s second stage.
This would have been Williams’ third space mission; she had previously spent 322 days in space, setting a record for the most hours of spacewalk by a woman before being surpassed by Peggy Whitson.
If the mission had not been postponed owing to a technical fault, the Indian-origin astronaut would have become the first woman to fly on a new space shuttle’s inaugural crewed mission by now.
