A last-second scrub aborted Thursday’s test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
The countdown reached all the way to zero, and the engines started to ignite, but then everything was shut down. Elon Musk shared on X that some of the engines didn’t start, which triggered an automatic launch abort. “Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” he shared.
The last test flight in May of SpaceX’s Starship rocket was largely successful, demonstrating that most of the major changes in the design, known as Version 3, had improved reliability and performance.
However, the May flight experienced enough problems to warrant a do-over. The bottom booster stage crashed into the Gulf of Mexico instead of slowing to a hover to simulate a landing, while one of the engines on the upper-stage spacecraft shut down early.
If the next test flight, the 13th for Starship, accomplishes its objectives, SpaceX will be able to move on to the next set of more challenging objectives for Starship: entering orbit around Earth, returning the upper-stage spacecraft to Texas and catching it on the launch tower as it has done with the booster.
Starship is key to NASA’s moon plans.
SpaceX is to provide a version of Starship to take its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. But work on Starship has taken longer than Mr. Musk and SpaceX originally promised.
For the moon mission, SpaceX needs to demonstrate several technological firsts. That includes conducting multiple Starship launches over a short period of time, because the lunar lander version of Starship will need to have its propellant tanks refilled before leaving low-Earth orbit.
Transferring ultracold liquid methane and liquid oxygen between two spacecrafts in the weightlessness of space has not yet been demonstrated.
Those more ambitious goals cannot be attempted until SpaceX shows it can reliably launch Starship to orbit.
A successful test flight could also shore up investor confidence in SpaceX, which debuted on the stock market in June in the largest initial public offering ever. Its stock price shot upward to a height of $225.64, a jump of 67 percent, a few days later, but it has slumped since. On Thursday, it closed at $131.11, below the initial offering price of $135.