SOUTH PADRE ISLAND – SpaceX delayed a planned test flight for its Starship megarocket by 24 hours until Monday (Tuesday Manila time), saying it needed time to troubleshoot problems, in the latest setback for Elon Musk’s behemoth after a series of explosive failures.
The recent problems have led some observers to doubt whether the world’s biggest and most powerful launch vehicle will be capable of taking humans back to the Moon — or achieving Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars.
The rocket had been scheduled to blast off on its tenth flight from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas at 6:30 pm local time on Sunday.
However, around 15 minutes before lift-off, SpaceX scrubbed the flight, which is a relatively common event for space launches.
“Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” it said on X. AFP
Musk later posted on the same platform that a “ground side liquid oxygen leak needs to be fixed.”
SpaceX said it had rescheduled the launch for “as soon as” the same time on Monday, though it cautioned that the timing was still “dynamic and likely to change.”
Road closures nearby Starbase indicated that Tuesday had also been cleared for a potential attempt.
The hour-long mission had planned to put the rocket’s upper stage through a series of trials before the lower stage booster splashed down in the Indian Ocean.
Starship is central to billionaire SpaceX founder Musk’s ambition of colonizing Mars, while NASA is counting on a modified version to return Americans to the Moon. AFP
