SpaceX postponed the first test flight to Thursday spaceshipthe most powerful rocket ever built, intended to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond after a technical error interrupted the countdown.
A scheduled launch of the giant rocket on Monday was canceled less than 10 minutes before the scheduled launch because of a pressure problem in the first stage booster, SpaceX said.
The private space company resumed the countdown in what was described as a “wet dress rehearsal,” stopping the clock 10 seconds from the end, just before the booster’s massive engines were due to fire.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said a frozen pressure valve is forcing a cleanup of the launch scheduled for 8:20 a.m. Central Time (1:20 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
“Learned a lot today, unload propellant now and try again in a few days.” musk tweeted.
Before announcing Thursday as the new launch target, SpaceX had said the inaugural flight would be delayed by at least 48 hours to recycle the liquid methane and liquid oxygen that power the rocket.
The new launch window opens at 8:28 a.m. Central Time (13:28 GMT) on Thursday and will last 62 minutes, SpaceX said on Twitter.
The US Space Agency NASA has selected the Starship spacecraft to launch astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 — a mission dubbed Artemis III — for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
Starship consists of a 50-foot-tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo, sitting on a 230-foot-tall Super Heavy first stage launch vehicle.
SpaceX conducted a successful test launch of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February, but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown together.
The integrated test flight is intended to assess their performance in combination.
Musk had warned before the launch that a delay was likely.
“It’s a very risky flight,” he said previously. “It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.
“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” Musk said. “We will be very careful and if we see anything that worries us we will postpone.”
Multi-Planet Species
NASA will launch astronauts into lunar orbit in November 2024 on its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Starship is both larger and more powerful than SLS, capable of lifting a payload in excess of 100 tons into orbit.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than double the Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.
The plan for the integrated test flight calls for the Super Heavy Booster to separate from Starship approximately three minutes after liftoff and land in the Gulf of Mexico.
The spacecraft, which has six engines of its own, will continue to an altitude of nearly 150 miles, nearly orbiting the Earth before landing in the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.
“If it gets into orbit, that’s a huge achievement,” Musk said.
“If we get far enough away from the launch pad before something goes wrong, I would consider that a success,” he said. “Don’t blow up the launch pad.”
SpaceX envisions eventually launching a spacecraft into orbit and then refueling it with another spacecraft so it can continue its journey to Mars or beyond.
Musk said the goal is to make Starship reusable and bring the price down to a few million dollars per flight.
“Long term – long term means, I don’t know, two or three years – we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.
The ultimate goal is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on “the path to a multi-planet civilization,” Musk said.
“We’re in that brief moment in civilization where it’s possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we have a chance.”
