Washington (AFP)
An unmanned test mission of Boeing's space capsule, Starliner, which will eventually serve as a taxi to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), had to be postponed again, NASA said on Monday.
This test, already postponed to early April, will suffer from a further delay, this time caused by bad weather in Texas, which in particular caused large power cuts in this southern state of the United States.
"We wasted time with the bad weather in Houston, about a week," Steve Stich, NASA's commercial flight program manager, said during a press conference.
The new date is being "evaluated", he added.
A Starliner test with astronauts on board is then planned, still in 2021, "for the moment in September", he added.
In December 2019, during a first test flight, the capsule failed to dock with the ISS, and returned to Earth prematurely - a setback for the aerospace industry giant.
Since then, its program has lagged behind SpaceX, the other company chosen by NASA to develop a vehicle to reach the ISS from the United States.
Its Crew Dragon capsule has already sent astronauts to the Station in June, then in November 2020, and four others, including Frenchman Thomas Pesquet, will be on board again next April.
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