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Rescheduled Starship launch for
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SpaceX will wait until April 20 for the next launch attempt.
SpaceX will have to try again another day to launch Starship. The countdown to liftoff of the most powerful rocket ever built was called off on Monday morning at a launch site in South Texas, near Brownsville, because of a problem with a valve in the booster’s pressurization system that appeared to be frozen.
The company said it will attempt the flight again onThursday, April 20. The launch window opens at 9:28 a.m. Eastern time and lasts 62 minutes.
The launch postponement followed a prediction by Mr. Musk, who said he anticipated a scrubbed flight in an audio discussion with Twitter users on Sunday night.
“There’s a good chance that it gets postponed since we’re going to be pretty careful about this launch,” he said. “If it does go wrong, there’s a lot to go wrong.”
Starship, along with its Super Heavy booster, is the tallest rocket ever built, and the booster’s 33 engines will produce more thrust than any rocket ever has. It is designed to be fully reusable, potentially slashing the cost of getting to space while extending SpaceX’s dominance in the rocket launch business.
Mr. Musk’s vision is for Starship to eventually take people to Mars. The company has also received contracts from NASA to fly astronaut crews for its Artemis program to the surface of the moon using a version of Starship.
But this particular rocket will not fly nearly as far. As the first Starship to make it to space, it is planned to rise to an altitude of 150 miles and travel most of the way around the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific off Hawaii.
Image
Hundreds of people are gathered on grassy dunes near the launchpad in the early morning. Some are seated in camping chairs, some have long camera lenses on tripods pointed at the launchpad, some are seated on top of parked cars.
Crowds prepared to disperse as the launch was postponed on Monday.Credit…Go Nakamura/Reuters
After the decision was made on Monday, the company’s engineers continued with the countdown as a “wet dress rehearsal” — doing everything for a launch except an actual launch — to check that other systems were working, stopping it at 10 seconds, just before engines would have been ignited. The shiny frost-covered rocket remained on the launchpad as liquid methane and liquid oxygen were drained out of the propellant tanks.
Glitches often crop up during rocket countdowns, especially for first launches of new rocket designs. Last year, NASA similarly called off several launch attempts of its Space Launch System rocket before a successful liftoff in November.
Each attempt yields a trove of data for engineers to study, enabling them to implement improvements for future countdowns.
Video from around the launch site streamed by SpaceX and other media companies showed large gatherings of people in the coastal area along the Gulf of Mexico, just north of where Texas and Mexico meet. The crowds were kept at a distance to protect them from the powerful sound of the rocket’s 33 engines firing at once, and the potential for falling debris and a shock wave of an explosion if something had gone wrong.
For Mr. Musk, a successful test would bring a win as his other companies have experienced difficulties. Tesla, his electric carmaker, has been hampered by rising interest rates and heightened competition, leading it to slash prices on its vehicles. Twitter, the social media company Mr. Musk bought last October for $44 billion, has been affected by extensive staff cuts, service outages and revenue shortfalls, leading the billionaire to more than halve its valuation to $20 billion.
Ryan Mac contributed reporting.
Michael Roston
April 17,2023, 9:24 a.m. ETApril 17, 2023
April 17, 2023
Michael Roston
Editing spaceflight news.
On its webcast, SpaceX said it would need a minimum of 48 hours to try to launch Starship again because it will need more propellants for the rocket.