SpaceX scrubbed the 10th test flight of Starship, the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars, for the second night in a row on Monday,<\/p>\n
The vehicle was fully loaded with propellants on the launchpad in Starbase, Texas. But persistent weather problems, particularly clouds that could put the vehicle at risk during flight, led to the launch being called off not long after 8 p.m. Eastern time.<\/p>\n
That will further delay to another night a launch that sought to make up for several disappointing failures in earlier flights. The test is highly important for Mr. Musk and SpaceX, which hopes to show that the spacecraft is capable of achieving key goals. It\u2019s also critical for NASA, which needs Starship to land its astronauts on the moon.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe stakes are the highest they\u2019ve ever been for a Starship launch,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. But it is not quite a \u201cmake or break\u201d moment, he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they have another failure, they still have more room to continue iterating and trying, but they are running out of room,\u201d Mr. Harrison said.<\/p>\n
The launch was originally set to occur Sunday evening. But soon after propellants started flowing into the rocket\u2019s tanks, SpaceX announced that launch attempt had been scrubbed.<\/p>\n
Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator, said during Monday night\u2019s livestream that the problem on Sunday was a leak in a line that fed liquid oxygen into the rocket.<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk, in a \u201cNuke Mars\u201d T-shirt, also joined the Monday broadcast with Bill Riley, the SpaceX vice president of Starship engineering, to discuss the rocket\u2019s technical features and the motivations for building it.<\/p>\n
The company said on its X account<\/a> that it was \u201cdetermining the next best available opportunity to fly.\u201d<\/p>\n What is Starship?<\/p>\n Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Even more ambitiously, Mr. Musk says it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site and caught by giant mechanical arms.<\/p>\n If SpaceX can pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionize the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger and heavier payloads at much lower costs.<\/p>\n The 400-foot-tall vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, the Starship, and a powerful booster stage, with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.<\/p>\n What happened during the last few test flights?<\/p>\n SpaceX uses a \u201cbreak it and fix it\u201d philosophy of development, unlike the traditional approach of NASA and older aerospace companies that attempt to anticipate all of the engineering problems before a test flight. That leads to more failures, but SpaceX has shown it can be faster and more efficient.<\/p>\n But the seventh, eight and ninth test flights were disappointing, because the upper-stage Starship failed at an earlier part of the flight than on the fifth and sixth test flights, which survived re-entry and simulated a landing over the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n The ninth test flight, in May, reached space<\/a>, but a failure of a device known as the fuel tank pressurization system diffuser caused a leak of methane into the spacecraft\u2019s nose cone. That led to the skipping of the in-space engine burn and deployment of the Starlink mock-up satellites. The spacecraft tumbled in space before it burned up as it re-entered over the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n The two previous flights failed even earlier, with the Starship upper stage disintegrating during its ascent and affecting air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean.<\/p>\n SpaceX said it had redesigned the diffuser.<\/p>\n What will happen during this test flight?<\/p>\n The Super Heavy booster will propel the rocket through the densest part of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. After 2 minutes 38 seconds, the engines of the upper-stage spacecraft will ignite, and the booster will fall away.<\/p>\n For this test flight, the booster will not head back to the launch site but will instead simulate a landing over the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX will use this flight to test alternative configurations of the Super Heavy engines during the descent before it splashes into the sea.<\/p>\n The upper-stage Starship spacecraft will continue upward, reaching orbital velocities, but traveling along a trajectory that will re-enter over the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n Along the way, it will test out deploying eight mock-ups of SpaceX\u2019s next-generation Starlink internet satellites and a brief firing of one of the engines while in space. In-space engine burns are key to future flights when the Starship upper stage is to enter orbit and then fire its engines again to drop out of orbit.<\/p>\n SpaceX has also planned experiments to test Starship\u2019s ability to survive re-entry.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only way to know what we should be adjusting is to fly repeatedly and to be able to examine the ship on landing,\u201d Mr. Musk said of experiments with the ship\u2019s heat shields during the SpaceX livestream before the launch.<\/p>\n What happened to the rocket that was originally planned for this test flight?<\/p>\n In June, the Starship upper stage that was to be used for the 10th test flight exploded<\/a> on the ground ahead of an engine test.<\/p>\n No one was hurt, but the explosion destroyed the spacecraft and severely damaged a SpaceX test site that is separate from the launchpad.<\/p>\n Is SpaceX still going to launch a Starship to Mars next year?<\/p>\n