3:26 PM ET, June 1, 2024
ULA CEO: ‘We’ll know more this evening’
From CNN’s Ashley Strickland
Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, speaks at a news conference on June 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
NASA TV
Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, which built the Atlas V rocket Starliner, said the teams should get a so-called ground launch sequencer this evening to assess the problem that caused the launch scrub.
The ground launch sequencer is the computer that tells the rocket to launch, and it triggers the automatic hold that prevents the launch.
Once the rocket is drained of fuel, crews can evaluate the redundant computer system three times on the launch pad.
“Imagine a large computer in which the functions of the computer as a controller are separated by individual cards or printed wire circuit boards with their logic devices. So they are all separate, but together it is a unified controller,” said Bruno. “And we do that to make it easier to fix them, to replace parts, so that we can change just one element of the thing without changing the whole thing.”
All three computers need to agree to begin, Bruno said.
“The third one was slow to come, and it tripped a red line — it created an automatic seizure because even though the health system didn’t notice that it came irregularly, it took too long, so something wasn’t right,” Bruno said. .
If the problem can be fixed tonight, Starliner could launch Sunday at 12:03 p.m. ET. Otherwise, the next launch attempts will be on June 5 and June 6.
“We’ll know a lot more this evening,” Bruno said.
