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 web site 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 referred to as issues off.
“Standing down from at the moment’s tenth flight of Starship to permit time to troubleshoot a problem with floor programs,” SpaceX introduced at 7:13 p.m. EDT (2313 GMT) on Sunday in a publish on X, the social media web site owned by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. The corporate didn’t instantly announce a brand new goal date for Flight 10, however does have backup days out there by at the very least Aug. 26.
Starship is the largest and strongest rocket ever constructed, standing greater than 400 ft (122 meters) tall when totally stacked. It consists of two parts, each of that are designed to be totally and quickly reusable — a booster referred to as Tremendous Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft referred to as Starship, or Ship for brief.
SpaceX is creating Starship to assist humanity return to the moon and settle Mars, amongst different duties. NASA has tapped the automobile 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 will probably fly such a mission. The large rocket has carried out 9 take a look at missions up to now, 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 will probably be just like these of Flight 9. SpaceX plans to carry 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 also be imagined 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.
