SpaceX on Monday suspended the eighth test flight of its largest and most powerful rocket.
After a brief pause 40 seconds before the scheduled liftoff, the Starship mission was postponed. The fuel was then removed from the booster and spacecraft.
“Today's test flight attempt has been cancelled,” SpaceX said in a statement to X. “The Starship team is looking for the next best opportunity to launch.”
On Tuesday, weather conditions will be more favorable.
The Falcon 9 launch was scheduled for a 60-minute launch window around 5:30 p.m. CT in south Texas at SpaceX's Starbase Boca Chica site near Brownsville. The flight was canceled at about 5:55 p.m.
The live broadcast began approximately 40 minutes before the start.
SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is developing Starship with the goal of eventually helping to colonize the moon and, ideally, Mars. It's a super-heavy one — Booster 15.
The latest launch, on January 16, ended in failure shortly after liftoff when the upper stage of SpaceX's unmanned Starship rocket exploded minutes after takeoff, causing the aerospace company to declare the vessel “lost.” It was the seventh test flight of the heavy-lift spacecraft.
“The most likely cause of the destruction of the vehicle was determined to be a harmonic reaction that was significantly greater during flight than observed during testing, resulting in increased stress on the propulsion system,” the explosion investigation report said.
“The subsequent fuel leaks exceeded the ventilation capacity of the ship's attic space and caused a sustained fire,” the department added.
The new flight was planned to launch four model satellites similar to the next-generation Starlink broadband satellites into orbit as part of the mission's first test of satellite deployment.
SpaceX officials say the Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are “expected to break up upon reentry” about 66 minutes after launch somewhere near the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.
The 232-foot-tall Super Heavy rocket is the heaviest aircraft ever built by humans, weighing in at about 12 million pounds at launch. Overall, Starship is 394 feet long, while the Saturn V rocket stood 363 feet tall and weighed 6.2 million pounds when it flew to the moon.
SpaceX's Starship is expected to travel to the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis program, with humans expected to land on the surface no earlier than mid-2027, the first time since 1972. Plans are also underway for a trip to Mars.
Sourse: www.upi.com
