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SpaceX was forced to scrap the launch of its giant Starship rocket from Texas again on Monday, this time due to weather, marking the latest in a streak of setbacks for the Elon Musk-run company.<\/p>\n
The 232ft (71-metre) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171ft tall Starship upper half \u2013 together taller than New York\u2019s Statue of Liberty \u2013 was due to take off from SpaceX\u2019s Starbase rocket facilities at 7.30pm local time. But the launch was called off at the last minute.<\/p>\n
\u201cStanding down from today\u2019s flight test attempt due to weather,\u201d the company said on X, the social network also owned by Musk.<\/p>\n
SpaceX has seen a series of delays as it seeks to achieve several long-sought milestones essential to the rocket system\u2019s reusable design. A liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad nixed a Sunday launch attempt, billionaire Musk wrote on X overnight.<\/p>\n
Development of SpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket, key to the company\u2019s powerful launch business and Musk\u2019s goal to send humans to Mars, has faced repeated hiccups this year. Nasa hopes to use the rocket as soon as 2027 for its first crewed moon landing since the Apollo program.<\/p>\n
SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue, is also tied to Starship\u2019s success. Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, into space.<\/p>\n
Musk, for his part, remained bullish. \u201cIn about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours,\u201d the entrepreneur said on Sunday, replying to a user on X.<\/p>\n
This year, two Starship testing failures early in flight, another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a massive test stand explosion in June that sent debris flying into nearby Mexican territory have tested SpaceX\u2019s capital-intensive test-to-failure development approach, in which new iterations of rocket prototypes are flown to their technical limits. That ethos is markedly different from SpaceX\u2019s rivals such as Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket made an operational debut in January following years of on-the-ground development and testing. The new Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had a similar upbringing before its 2024 debut.<\/p>\n
With SpaceX\u2019s approach, testing failures early in Starship\u2019s flight prevent the company from gathering vital technical data needed to advance the rocket\u2019s design.<\/p>\n
Still, SpaceX, which Musk expects to record around $15.5bn in revenue this year, has continued to swiftly produce new Starships for test flights at Starbase, a sprawling and rapidly growing rocket industrial complex. The area was made a municipality in May by local voters, many of them SpaceX workers.<\/p>\n
Starship\u2019s setbacks underscore the technical complexities of the latest iteration. The ship is packed with far more capabilities than predecessor models such as increased thrust, a potentially more resilient heat shield and stronger steering flaps crucial to nailing its atmospheric reentry \u2013 key traits of its rapidly reusable design that Musk has long pushed for.<\/p>\n
SpaceX has a lengthy to-do list for Starship\u2019s development before the rocket begins routine missions envisioned by Musk. That includes demonstrating safe returns from space, payload deployments in orbit and complex in-space propellant refuelings crucial to its moon mission assignments from Nasa.<\/p>\n
Once in space, Starship will attempt to deploy mock Starlink satellites and reignite an engine along its suborbital path around the globe. Atmospheric re-entry over the Indian Ocean will test its exterior steering flaps and an array of experimental heat shield tiles as the ship blazes through intense friction and heat.<\/p>\n
Reuters contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SpaceX was forced to scrap the launch of its giant Starship rocket from Texas again on Monday, this time due to weather, marking the latest in a streak of setbacks for the Elon Musk-run company. The 232ft (71-metre) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171ft tall Starship upper half \u2013 together taller than New York\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[546,3164,367,1681,73,74,1010,286],"class_list":{"0":"post-17829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-days","9":"tag-launch","10":"tag-rocket","11":"tag-scraps","12":"tag-spacex","13":"tag-starship","14":"tag-texas","15":"tag-time"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}