SpaceX delays Starship launch citing ground systems trouble before liftoff

By Loren Grush

 

SpaceX delayed a critical test flight of its massive Starship rocket roughly half an hour before liftoff on Sunday, saying it needed to troubleshoot an unspecified problem with its ground systems. 

 

Starship was set to take off on its 10th major mission from SpaceX’s South Texas launch facility, called Starbase, during a window that opened at 6:30 pm local time. The mission had heightened stakes following a series of explosive setbacks this year. 

 

There was no immediate word on when SpaceX would attempt the flight.  

 

SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk hinted on his social media site X that he would provide a technical update about the Starship program on Sunday, though the billionaire appeared not to go through with the event. 

 

SpaceX has been periodically launching Starship on a series of test missions designed to ready the vehicle for lofting satellites – and eventually people – to Earth’s orbit and beyond. Yet the first two flights this year blew up within minutes, a third failed to deploy dummy satellites and spun out of control, and another rocket exploded on a test stand in June during fueling.

 

Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill Musk’s aims. SpaceX has opted to temporarily reassign roughly 20 per cent of its Falcon engineering team to Starship to help with testing and reliability, Bloomberg previously reported.

 

The company says it uses failures as learning opportunities that it can apply to future launches. But after a lackluster start to the year, this next mission will face extra pressure to perform better than the others. 

 

“A successful test would almost kind of erase the challenges of the last year,” said Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and consulting firm. “An unsuccessful one is just going to add to that scrutiny and that sense of what’s going on.”

 

Advertised as the most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is meant to fulfill Musk’s dream of starting a human settlement on Mars. The vehicle is designed to be fully reusable and is supposed to eventually replace SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the company’s sole vehicle for launching satellites and humans to space. The eventual goal is to land and take off from the moon and Mars. 

 

SpaceX is still years away from unlocking Starship’s full power. 

 

For now, the company is trying to demonstrate that the rocket can achieve orbit, deploy satellites and return to Earth fully intact. SpaceX has so far shown on two flights that it can catch the Super Heavy booster, the massive lower portion of the rocket that lifts Starship into space.  

 

For this mission, SpaceX doesn’t plan to catch the Super Heavy booster. Instead, it aims to test its ability to undertake maneuvers midflight before Super Heavy attempts a controlled landing offshore.