Boeing Co said on Monday that it would send its Starliner astronaut spacecraft to the International Space Station on another unmanned mission, months after the last flight was canceled due to a software bug.
During the December test, a series of software issues and an issue with the spacecraft’s automatic timer prevented Starliner from docking at the space station and returning to Earth a week earlier. In February, a NASA safety assessment panel discovered that Boeing had narrowly missed a “catastrophic failure” in the failed test, and recommended that it investigate the company’s software verification process before flying people to space.
NASA officials continued to wait to re-order because they “did not think it would be enough” to address all concerns raised in the security assessment, a service official told Reuters, adding that NASA would make additional recommendations. Boeing and Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, are building space taxis separately to transport astronauts to the space station as part of NASA’s efforts to revive its human spaceflight program.
“If we fly with another unmanned aerial vehicle, we can complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle for taxpayers at no charge,” the company said in a statement.
(This story has not been edited by staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
News