SpaceX postpones 10th test flight of Starship minutes before launch over ground systems issue

New Delhi: Billionaire Elon Musk-led SpaceX on Monday postponed the 10th test flight of its huge rocket Starship due to a ground systems issue.

SpaceX called off a planned test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday night, just minutes before launch, citing a technical problem with ground systems.

The Starship Flight 10 launch was scheduled from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday. However, just 17 minutes before the launch window, the company called things off.

“Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” SpaceX shared in a post on social media platform X.

While SpaceX did not immediately announce a new target date, it does have backup days available till August 26.

However, 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