Liftoff on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Starliner is targeted for 2:53 p.m. EDT Friday, July 30, from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The uncrewed mission will test the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner spacecraft and Atlas V rocket from launch to docking to a return to Earth in the desert of the western United States. Following a successful completion of the OFT-2 mission, NASA and Boeing are targeting late 2021 for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test (CFT), Starliner’s first flight with astronauts aboard.
This is the first planned docking of Starliner after the December 2019 flight failed to rendezvous with the station due to an anomaly with the spacecraft's mission elapsed time (MET) clock. On 6 April 2020, Boeing announced that they would redo the Orbital Flight Test to prove and meet all of the test objectives. A four-month investigation of the first Orbital Flight Test resulted in Boeing proposing another uncrewed flight test of the spacecraft's systems. NASA accepted the proposal from Boeing to do another uncrewed test flight at no cost to the American taxpayers, at an estimated out-of-pocket cost of US$410 million. The mission is planned to use the hardware, Starliner, and Atlas V, originally planned for use on the crewed flight test.
