Bad weather again delays SpaceX’s 10th test flight of Starship

New Delhi: The 10th test flight of the huge rocket Starship has again been scrubbed at the last minute — second day in a row — due to bad weather, said Billionaire Elon Musk-led SpaceX on Tuesday.

The Starship Flight 10 launch was initially scheduled from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday (5:00 am IST on Monday). However, just 17 minutes before the launch window, the company called off the launch, citing a technical problem with ground systems.

It attempted the next flight at the same time, 7:30 p.m. EDT on Monday (5:00 a.m. IST on Tuesday), but was scrubbed again, as clouds failed to clear the area.

“Standing down from today’s flight test attempt due to weather. Starship team is determining the next best available opportunity to fly,” SpaceX shared in a post on the social media platform X.

“Launch called off for tonight due to anvil clouds over launch site (lightning risk),” added Musk on X.

While SpaceX did not immediately announce a new target date, the next possible chance is on Wednesday morning. The cancellation marked another setback for Musk’s giant rocket, which has faced repeated failures in recent months.

To date, Starship has performed nine test missions. But the last three, which lifted off this year — in January, March, and May– experienced serious problems. On Flight 7 and Flight 8, the Ship exploded less than 10 minutes after launch, while on Flight 9, it broke apart upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.

In a blog post, Space wrote that Flight 10 was planned after probing previous faults and making changes.

“After completing the investigations into the loss of Starship on its ninth flight test and the Ship 36 static fire anomaly, hardware and operational changes have been made to increase reliability,” it said.

Standing more than 400 feet tall when fully stacked, Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

It consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a booster known as Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity return to the Moon and settle on Mars.

It will launch the moon lander for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission that aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2026.

IANS