SpaceX came within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket on Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle tethered to Earth for at least another day.
Clouds and rain cleared the area around the SpaceX launch site in south Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX delayed the launch time by an hour, but the countdown appeared to go smoothly once boosters began loading onto the rocket.
That was true, at least, until the countdown clock stopped 40 seconds before takeoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only to have the computer controlling the launch sequence stop the clock again. There were five suspensions in total before SpaceX canceled the launch attempt.
“It looks like we’re not going to be able to resolve this issue in time today, so we’re pulling out of the launch,” said Dan Huot, a SpaceX official who hosted the company’s livestream Thursday. “We have the vehicle fully loaded. We did a couple different holds while we were going over that count.”
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, attributed the problem to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract into an umbilical arm that connects the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window on Friday would open at 5:30 p.m. CDT (22:30 UTC).
Starship’s upcoming test flight will mark the first liftoff from a new launch pad at Starbase, Texas, the year-old city that encompasses SpaceX’s test site in South Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border. It will be the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster to date, and the first to employ a revised design that SpaceX calls Starship Version 3. Starship V3 introduces numerous changes, including 39 more efficient, higher-thrust Raptor engines, a redesigned propulsion system, three larger grille fins to replace four smaller ones, and a reusable hot-priming ring permanently attached to the top of the Super Heavy booster.
