After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship — the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars — was back on the launchpad for a 10th test flight on Sunday night.
But soon after propellants started flowing into the rocket’s tanks, SpaceX announced that the launch was scrubbed.
“Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” the company said.
For now, the rocket remains on the ground at SpaceX’s Starship site in souther Texas, next Brownsville.
The test, when it takes off, is highly important for Mr. Musk and SpaceX, which hopes to show that the spacecraft is capable of achieving key goals. It’s also critical for NASA, which needs Starship to land its astronauts on the moon.
“The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been for a Starship launch,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. But it is not quite a “make or break” moment, he added.
“If they have another failure, they still have more room to continue iterating and trying, but they are running out of room,” Mr. Harrison said.
SpaceX did not immediately announce when the next launch attempt would take place. If the issue can be fixed quickly, it could try Monday evening with a one-hour launch window opening at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time.
What is Starship?
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Even more ambitiously, Mr. Musk says it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site and caught by giant mechanical arms.
If SpaceX can pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionize the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger and heavier payloads at much lower costs.
The 400-foot-tall vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, the Starship, and a powerful booster stage, with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.
What happened during the last few test flights?
SpaceX uses a “break it and fix it” philosophy of development, unlike the traditional approach of NASA and older aerospace companies that attempt to anticipate all of the engineering problems before a test flight. That leads to more failures, but SpaceX has shown it can be faster and more efficient.
But the seventh, eight and ninth test flights were disappointing, because the upper-stage Starship failed at an earlier part of the flight than on the fifth and sixth test flights, which survived re-entry and simulated a landing over the Indian Ocean.
The ninth test flight, in May, reached space, but a failure of a device known as the fuel tank pressurization system diffuser caused a leak of methane into the spacecraft’s nose cone. That led to the skipping of the in-space engine burn and deployment of the Starlink mock-up satellites. The spacecraft tumbled in space before it burned up as it re-entered over the Indian Ocean.
The two previous flights failed even earlier, with the Starship upper stage disintegrating during its ascent and affecting air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean.
SpaceX said it had redesigned the diffuser.
What will happen during this test flight?
The Super Heavy booster will propel the rocket through the densest part of the Earth’s atmosphere. After 2 minutes 38 seconds, the engines of the upper-stage spacecraft will ignite, and the booster will fall away.
For this test flight, the booster will not head back to the launch site but will instead simulate a landing over the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX will use this flight to test alternative configurations of the Super Heavy engines during the descent before it splashes into the sea.
The upper-stage Starship spacecraft will continue upward, reaching orbital velocities, but traveling along a trajectory that will re-enter over the Indian Ocean.
Along the way, it will test out deploying eight mock-ups of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink internet satellites and a brief firing of one of the engines while in space. In-space engine burns are key to future flights when the Starship upper stage is to enter orbit and then fire its engines again to drop out of orbit.
SpaceX has also planned experiments to test Starship’s ability to survive re-entry.
What happened to the rocket that was originally planned for this test flight?
In June, the Starship upper stage that was to be used for the 10th test flight exploded on the ground ahead of an engine test.
No one was hurt, but the explosion destroyed the spacecraft and severely damaged a SpaceX test site that is separate from the launchpad.
Is SpaceX still going to launch a Starship to Mars next year?
In September, Mr. Musk said the first Starships would launch toward Mars in 2026 without any people aboard, and the first crewed flight could take place as soon as 2028.
In May, Mr. Musk was less sanguine. “We’ll try to make that opportunity, if we get lucky,” Musk said during a company presentation. “I think we’ll probably have a 50/50 chance right now.”
Will NASA land astronauts on the moon in 2027?
Artemis III, the mission that is to land two NASA astronauts in the south polar region of the moon, is currently scheduled for late 2027. A version of Starship is to be used as the lander, to take the astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.
With the delays in Starship’s development, Artemis III will almost certainly not launch until 2028 or later. SpaceX still has to demonstrate key capabilities, including the launching of multiple Starships in quick succession and the transfer of propellants between Starships.
Will China beat NASA back to the moon?
China has been making steady progress on its program to land astronauts on the moon before 2030. It announced this month that it had successfully tested a lunar lander.
Mr. Harrison said he thought there was a greater than 50/50 chance that China would reach the moon before NASA did with Artemis III.
If that happens, “it’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Harrison said. “It is more of a psychological kind of hit than anything. ”
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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