Cape Canaveral (United States) (AFP)

The docking of the new Boeing Starliner space capsule, launched Friday without crew on board, will not take place as planned Saturday with the International Space Station (ISS), announced the NASA boss, the rest of the mission remaining uncertain.

Jim Bridenstine, in several tweets, explained that an anomaly had occurred in the "elapsed time" counter system in the vehicle and had made Starliner believe that it had achieved the push necessary to get on the good orbit.

"The capsule consumed more fuel than expected to maintain precise control. This made the meeting with the Space Station impossible," he wrote.

He did not clearly state that this meeting could not happen later. But a failure would be terrible for the reputation of Boeing, already stuck in the crisis of its flagship 737 MAX, and for NASA, which counts on the company to resume human space flights from the United States next year, with the SpaceX company.

A press conference is scheduled at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:30 p.m. GMT.

Takeoff had taken place normally from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the capsule had detached from the Atlas V rocket about a quarter of an hour after launch, before dawn.

But soon after, Boeing and NASA announced that Starliner was in a "non-nominal" orbital insertion, which means that the spacecraft was not on the right trajectory to raise its altitude and catch up with the ISS, which is in orbit at approximately 400 km altitude.

A Boeing spokeswoman for the Kennedy Space Center, Kelly Kaplan, told reporters that Starliner was in a "stable and safe configuration".

Boeing engineers control the capsule, and Jim Bridenstine also wrote that Starliner gains altitude using its engines.

If it was confirmed that reaching the ISS was now impossible, an option could be to return Starliner to Earth, to one of the five planned landing sites in the western United States, in order to save the ship and reuse it for another mission.

© 2019 AFP