Elon Musk’s SpaceX has called off a planned test flight of its Starship megarocket following an issue at the launch site.
About 30 minutes before the planned liftoff at its Texas launch facility on Sunday, SpaceX said that it was abandoning its 10th test flight to “allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems”.
SpaceX said it would attempt the launch again on Monday.
The launch failure is the latest in a series of botched missions by SpaceX.
Test flights of the rocket’s upper stage in January, March and May ended in mid-flight explosions, while a “static fire” test in June resulted in the vehicle exploding on the launchpad.
Starship is designed to eventually be fully reusable, but SpaceX has so far been unable to get the vehicle’s upper stage to deliver a payload to space or return to the launch site.
The 403-feet (123-metre) spacecraft is key to Musk’s goal of colonising Mars, while NASA plans to use a customised version of the vehicle for its planned crewed missions to the Moon.
If SpaceX’s latest launch went ahead as planned, the Starship upper stage would have separated from the Super Heavy booster dozens of miles in altitude.
Super Heavy, which has returned for a landing at its launchpad in giant mechanical arms in past tests, would have targeted the Gulf of Mexico for a soft water landing to test a backup engine configuration.
Starship was to briefly ignite its own engines to blast further into space, where it would have attempted to release its first batch of mock Starlink satellites and reignite an engine while on a suborbital path around the planet.
If Starship’s 10th test flight eventually succeeds, SpaceX will still face formidable technical hurdles, from making the system fully and rapidly reusable at low cost to proving it can refuel super-cooled propellant in orbit.
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