The press service of Roscosmos reported that an official letter signed by Deputy Director General of the State Corporation for International Cooperation Sergei Savelyev has been sent to NASA with an offer to help troubleshoot the Starliner spacecraft.
Earlier, Boeing announced that the Starliner flight to the ISS would not take place in August. The ship will be sent to the factory to repair engine malfunctions.
The head of the ISS program at NASA Joel Montanblano, in turn, noted that the possibility of solving the problems on the vertical assembly plant had been exhausted. Therefore, now the Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids will be launched first, and then in the second half of October a new attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft to the ISS may take place.
On the Starliner spacecraft, a malfunction was identified with valves in low-thrust engines that are used for maneuvering in orbit. The spacecraft was supposed to head to the ISS on July 30, but then the launch was postponed due to an incident with the Russian module “Nauka”, which, after docking with the ISS, unexpectedly turned on the engines. And then the Starliner launch was postponed due to engine problems.
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