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It’s a Boeing. That alone lowers expectations these days, but the Boeing Starliner’s failure to launch on Saturday occasioned more than the usual quota of chewed fingernails. The Starliner is a space capsule mounted on an Atlas rocket that is meant to become Nasa’s first non-SpaceX way of putting astronauts in space since the Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. It’s not going smoothly. The first planned launch with people aboard, on 6 May, was scrubbed because of a helium leak in the Starliner’s propulsion module and a faulty pressure valve in the rocket underneath it. On Saturday the rocket came within 10 seconds of launching when the three computers controlling the countdown aborted it because one wasn’t in sync with the others. Yesterday Nasa cancelled another launch opportunity. The next is on Wednesday. What gives? Has rocketry got harder?