SpaceX has postponed the highly anticipated debut launch of its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket, citing a frozen valve in the final minutes of countdown. The uncrewed test flight, initially planned for lift-off from SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas "Starbase" facility, has been delayed for at least two days.
Standing 394 feet tall, the two-stage rocketship is taller than the Statue of Liberty. The 90-minute flight into space has been rescheduled for a minimum of 48 hours, making Wednesday the next available launch window for the mission. SpaceX later tweeted that its teams are "working towards Thursday, April 20" for the second launch attempt, sparking a series of jokes on social media referencing 4/20 as a date associated with cannabis culture.
Elon Musk, the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, also serves as the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, Inc. Achieving the Starship's maiden spaceflight would mark a significant milestone in SpaceX's ambition to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars, in partnership with NASA's Artemis human spaceflight program.
The successful debut flight would also make the Starship system the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth. The lower-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship spacecraft are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to Earth for soft landings, much like SpaceX's smaller Falcon 9 rocket.
However, the expendable first test flight to space will not recover either stage. Instead, both parts of the spacecraft will end their inaugural flight with crash landings at sea, with the upper-stage Starship touching down in the Pacific after nearly completing a full orbit of the Earth.
Over the years, Starship prototypes have made five sub-space flights up to 6 miles above Earth, but the Super Heavy booster has never left the ground. In February, SpaceX test-fired the booster, igniting 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for approximately 10 seconds with the rocket secured vertically atop a platform.
The Federal Aviation Administration granted a license for the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system last Friday, clearing the final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.
For the next launch bid, all 33 Raptor engines are expected to ignite simultaneously, propelling the Starship on a flight that will take it most of the way around Earth. The spacecraft will then re-enter the atmosphere and free-fall into the Pacific at supersonic speeds, approximately 60 miles off the coast of the northern Hawaiian islands. The Super Heavy booster will separate from the Starship and begin a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Starship rocket is almost twice as powerful as NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), which completed its debut uncrewed flight to orbit in November, sending the NASA Orion cruise vessel on a 10-day journey around the moon and back.
