We’ll have to attend a little bit longer to see the tenth take a look at flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket.
SpaceX deliberate to launch Starship Flight 10 from its Starbase website in South Texas this night (Aug. 24), throughout an hourlong stretch that started at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT). However simply 17 minutes earlier than that window opened, the corporate known as issues off.
“Standing down from immediately’s tenth flight of Starship to permit time to troubleshoot a difficulty with floor programs,” SpaceX introduced at 7:13 p.m. EDT (2313 GMT) on Sunday in a post on X, the social media website owned by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. The corporate is now targeting Monday (Aug. 25), throughout the identical launch window.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked. It consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a booster known as Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship, or Ship for short.
SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity return to the moon and settle Mars, amongst different duties. NASA has tapped the car to be the primary crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, and plans to make use of Starship to land astronauts on Earth’s nearest neighbor as early as 2027.
However Starship has a methods to go earlier than it could fly such a mission. The enormous rocket has carried out 9 take a look at missions so far, all of which launched from Starbase.
Three of these flights lifted off this yr — in January, March and Might, respectively. On all three liftoffs, Ship skilled severe issues; it exploded lower than 10 minutes after launch on Flight 7 and Flight 8 and broke aside upon reentry to Earth’s ambiance on Flight 9.
Flight 10’s targets might be just like these of Flight 9. SpaceX plans to convey Tremendous Heavy down within the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after launch and information Ship to a managed splashdown within the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia, about an hour after that.
Ship can be alleged to deploy eight dummy variations of SpaceX’s Starlink web satellites throughout its journey and carry out an engine-relight take a look at in house.
