Elon Musk’s SpaceX canceled the highly anticipated launch of its powerful new Starship rocket on Monday, delaying the unmanned vehicle’s first test flight into space. Starship rocket on the launch pad before its scheduled launch from SpaceX’s Starship base in Boca Chica as seen from South Padre Island, Texas on April 17, 2023.
Standing taller than the Statue of Liberty and 394 feet (120 m) tall, the two-stage starship rocket ship was originally scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas facility during a two-hour launch window that began at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).
But the California space company announced in a live webcast during the final minutes of the countdown that the flight attempt would be delayed for at least 48 hours, citing an overpressure problem in the rocket’s lower-stage booster.
Musk, the company’s billionaire founder and CEO, told a private audience on Twitter Sunday night that the mission had a better chance of being scrubbed than of launching on Monday.
Getting the vehicle into space for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambitions to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars at least initially as part of NASA’s newly launched Artemis human spaceflight program.
Elon Musk’s starship fails to take off
A successful debut flight would also immediately rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth.
Both the Super Heavy lower stage booster and the Starship upper stage cruise craft it will carry into space are designed as reusable components capable of flying back to Earth for a soft landing a maneuver that has become routine for the smaller Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX. .
However, not a single stage will be restored for the expendable first test flight into space, which should not last more than 90 minutes.
Prototypes of the Starship cruise ship have made five subspace flights up to 10 km above Earth in recent years, but the Super Heavy booster has never left Earth.
In February, SpaceX conducted a booster test firing, igniting 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for about 10 seconds with the rocket bolted vertically on the platform.
The Federal Aviation Administration last Friday granted a license for the first test flight of a fully assembled rocket system, clearing the final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.
If all goes according to plan for the next launch bid, all 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously, lifting the starship on a flight that will nearly complete an orbit of Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and free-falling into the Pacific at supersonic speeds. speed about 60 miles (97 km) off the coast of the northern Hawaiian Islands.
As designed, the Starship rocket is nearly twice as powerful as NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which first blasted into orbit unmanned in November, sending NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a 10-day trip around the moon rear.
Written by: Vaishali Verma
Read Now :US killed a senior Islamic State leader accused of planning attacks
