The SpaceX Starship mega-rocket, which was carrying several advanced satellites, had its test flight canceled seconds before liftoff this Thursday, after ignition failures in several of its engines.
The company’s founder and chief executive officer, Elon Musk, stated that two engines will be replaced “to ensure a good flight” before Starship takes off from Texas on a suborbital journey. It will be the 13th flight of Starship, considered the largest and most powerful rocket in the world, standing at 124 meters tall with 33 main engines.
The SpaceX broadcast showed the beginning of the ignition three seconds before the scheduled liftoff, filmed by a drone over the pad. Without going into detail, the data appearing on the screen revealed four engines failing to operate, with the remaining 29 shutting down immediately, keeping the rocket anchored to the pad.
This was the first time a full-scale Starship suffered a last-second abort.
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The launch team immediately began draining the propellant. “The most likely time for launch is early next week,” Musk said on the social network X.
Despite the favorable conditions, the automated launch system worked as intended by halting the liftoff after registering that an insufficient number of engines were active, which could have compromised the mission. The abort occurred after some previous Starship flights ended in explosions.
The Starship was carrying 20 of the latest and most advanced Starlink satellites, intended to be deployed during the flight of about one hour from the SpaceX base near the Texas-Mexico border. The satellites were to attempt to communicate with Starlinks already in orbit and capture images of the rocket’s heat shield.
The space agency NASA contracted SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to develop and operate the lunar landers that will enable the human return to the lunar surface after more than half a century.
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Both companies must have their landers — Starship and Blue Moon — ready by next year so that the crew of the Artemis III mission can practice docking in Earth orbit.
The subsequent mission, Artemis IV, planned for no earlier than 2028, is expected to use one of these landers to take two astronauts to the southern polar region of the Moon.
