(Reuters) – Boeing Co said on Monday it would resend its Starliner astronaut spacecraft on another unmanned mission aimed at taking it to the International Space Station, months after its last flight was cut short due to a software bug.
During the December test, a glitch with the spacecraft’s automated timer resulted in Starliner failing to dock at the space station and returned to Earth a week early.
Boeing and Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, are separately building space taxis to ferry astronauts to the space station under NASA’s effort to revive its human spaceflight program.
In February, a NASA safety review panel also found that Boeing had narrowly missed a “catastrophic failure” in the botched test, and recommended examining the company’s software verification process before letting it fly humans to space.
“Flying another uncrewed flight will allow us to complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle at no cost to the taxpayer,” the company said in a statement.
(Reporting by Saumya Sibi Joseph in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
