SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on the Twitter short message service that a valve was apparently frozen. “It will be at least 48 hours before we can attempt this test flight again,” a SpaceX official said.
US aerospace company SpaceX canceled at the last minute the long-awaited first test flight of its giant Starship rocket. The reason was a technical problem with the pressure equalization in the most powerful space rocket ever built, as SpaceX representatives said on Monday during the live stream of the planned launch. SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on the Twitter short message service that a valve was apparently frozen.
“It will be at least 48 hours before we can attempt this test flight again,” a SpaceX official said. This means that the next attempt to start will be on Wednesday at the earliest.
“Very risky flight”
The 120-meter-tall rocket was supposed to lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on Monday. The launch was halted less than ten minutes before the end of the countdown.
Musk had previously spoken of a “very risky flight”. After the test flight was cancelled, the tech billionaire wrote on Twitter that SpaceX “learned a lot today”. “We’ll try again in a few days.”
Starship consists of a 70-meter-high rocket called the Super Heavy and a 50-meter-long space shuttle with additional engines. The American space agency NASA selected the starship to take humans to the moon again for the first time in more than 50 years on the Artemis 3 mission in late 2025. Even flights to Mars should be possible with the rocket. In February, nearly all of the rocket’s engines fired successfully for the first time during a test at the rocket’s base.