Elon Musk’s SpaceX has called off a highly anticipated debut launch of its newly combined Starship cruise vessel and Super Heavy rocket in the final minutes of countdown due to a frozen valve, delaying the first uncrewed test flight of the vehicle into space.
The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120 metres high, was originally slated for blast-off from the SpaceX Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas, during a two-hour launch window that began at 8am EDT.
But the California-based company announced in a live webcast that it was scrubbing the planned 90-minute flight into space for a minimum of 48 hours, citing a frozen pressurisation valve in the lower-stage rocket booster.
That would make Wednesday the next available launch window for the mission.
SpaceX later said on Twitter its teams were “working towards Thursday” for a second launch attempt.
The tweet set off a flurry of jokes on the social media platform making reference to 4/20 as a date widely associated with cannabis culture, and to the notoriety Musk gained in 2018 for smoking marijuana during an appearance on a live web show.
Musk, who purchased Twitter last year for $US44 billion ($66 billion), is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX and chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla, Inc.
Getting the Starship to space for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars – at least initially as part of NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis.
A successful debut flight would also instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on earth.
Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship cruise vessel it would carry to space are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to earth for soft landings – a manoeuvre that has become routine for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.
Prototypes of the Starship cruise vessel have made five sub-space flights up to 10km above earth in recent years, but the Super Heavy booster has never left the ground.
In February, SpaceX did a test-firing of the booster, igniting 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for roughly 10 seconds with the rocket bolted in place vertically atop a platform.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday granted a licence for what would be the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system, clearing a final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.
If all goes as planned for the next launch bid, all 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously to loft the Starship on a flight most of the way around the earth before it re-enters the atmosphere and free-falls into the Pacific at supersonic speed, about 97km off the coast of the northern Hawaiian islands.
After separating from the Starship, the Super Heavy booster is expected to execute the beginnings of a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico.
As designed, the Starship rocket is almost two times more powerful than NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which made its debut uncrewed flight to orbit in November, sending a NASA cruise vessel called Orion on a 10-day voyage around the moon and back.
-AAP
