SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launch Thursday for the first flight of a longer, more powerful version of its Starship rocket, but a strange problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least another day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving the Starship launch pad with mostly sunny skies Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by an hour, but the countdown appeared to be proceeding smoothly after propellant was loaded into the rocket.
This was true, at least, until the countdown clock stopped 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to restart the countdown, but the computer controlling the launch sequence stopped the clock again. There were a total of five interruptions before SpaceX aborted the launch attempt.
“It looks like we won’t be able to resolve this issue in time today, so we’ll be skipping the launch,” said SpaceX executive Dan Huot, who hosted the company’s live broadcast Thursday. “We loaded the vehicle completely. We hit a few different holds as we worked through that count.”
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk blamed the scrub on a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on the umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If it can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window opens Friday at 5:30 p.m. CDT (22:30 UTC).
The upcoming Starship test flight will mark the first flight from a brand-new launch pad at Starbase, Texas, a year-old city that surrounds SpaceX’s South Texas test site near the US-Mexico border. This will be the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster to date, and the first to employ an overhauled design SpaceX calls Starship Version 3. Starship V3 featured several changes, including 39 more efficient, higher-thrust Raptor engines, a redesigned propulsion system, three larger grid fins to replace four smaller ones, and a reusable hot staging ring permanently attached to the top of the Super Heavy booster.
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