SpaceX postpones debut launch of Starship over technical glitch
Starship launch
SpaceX postponed the first test flight of Starship, its most powerful rocket ever built, on Monday, due to a technical failure. The rocket has been designed to send astronauts to the Moon and someday even to Mars and other places in space. Liftoff of the giant rocket was called off just minutes before the scheduled launch time because of a pressurisation issue in the booster stage, SpaceX officials said.
SpaceX said the launch will not be conducted for at least the next 48 hours. Starship had been scheduled to blast off at 9 am ET from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
"Learned a lot today, now offloading propellant, retrying in a few days," SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, tweeted.
Starship consists of a 164-foot tall spacecraft that has been designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket. The two-stage rocketship stands taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet.
The massive rocket marks a milestone in SpaceX's ambition to send humans back to the moon. But SpaceX faces enormous challenges in launching a spacecraft that will be the most powerful rocket on Earth once it lifts off.
"Success is not what should be expected," Musk told a private Twitter audience on Sunday night. He added that the best-case scenario would provide crucial data about how the vehicle ascends to space and how it will fly back to Earth.
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"Probably, tomorrow will not be successful, he said. "It's just a very fundamentally difficult thing."
A successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster was conducted in February but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown together. The test flight aims to test their performance in combination.
Earlier, Musk had warned that a delay might happen if all does not go as planned.
"It's a very risky flight," he said. "It's the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.
"There's a million ways this rocket could fail," Musk said. "We're going to be very careful and if we see anything that gives us concern, we'll postpone."
NASA aims to use the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 under its mission Artemis III. This will be the first time that men will go to the moon since the Apollo programme ended in 1972.
(With inputs from agencies)
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