SpaceX will have to try again another day to launch Starship. The countdown to liftoff of the most powerful rocket ever built was canceled Monday morning due to a problem with a valve in the booster pressurization system that appeared to be frozen.
The company’s engineers continued the countdown as a “dress rehearsal”, doing everything necessary for a launch, except for an actual launch, to check that other systems were working, stopping it at 10 seconds, just before the engines cut out. ignited The frost-covered silver rocket remained on the launch pad and engineers planned to drain the liquid methane and liquid oxygen from the propellant tanks.
SpaceX may try again in a few days according to its founder, Elon Musk.
The launch postponement followed a prediction by Musk, who said he anticipated a canceled launch in an audio discussion with Twitter users Sunday night.
“There is a good chance that it will be postponed as we are going to be very careful with this release,” he said. “If it goes wrong, there’s a lot that can go wrong.”
Failures often arise during rocket countdowns, especially for the first few launches of new rocket designs. Last year, NASA also canceled several launch attempts for its Space Launch System rocket before a successful liftoff in November.
Starship, a gigantic next-generation vehicle that is designed to eventually get people to Mars, sits at a SpaceX launch site in south Texas, not far from Brownsville. This will be the first Starship to reach space.
Video from around the launch site broadcast by SpaceX and other media companies showed large gatherings of people in the coastal area along the Gulf of Mexico, just north of where Texas and Mexico meet. Crowds stood back to protect them from the powerful sound of the 33 rocket engines firing at once, and the possibility of falling debris and an explosion shock wave if something had gone wrong.
