SpaceX scrubs critical 10th test launch of Mars rocket

SpaceX scrubbed the 10th test flight of Starship, the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars, for the second night in a row Monday.

- KENNETH CHANG

The vehicle was fully loaded with propellants on the launchpad in Starbase, Texas. But persistent weather problems, particularly clouds that could put the vehicle at risk during flight, led to the launch being called off not long after 8 pm Eastern time.

That will further delay to another night a launch that sought to make up for several disappointing failures in earlier flights. The test is highly important for Mr Musk and SpaceX, which hopes to show that the spacecraft is capable of achieving key goals. It's also critical for Nasa, which needs Starship to land its astronauts on the moon.

“The stakes are the highest they've ever been for a Starship launch,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. But it is not quite a “make or break” moment, he added.

“If they have another failure, they still have more room to continue iterating and trying, but they are running out of room,” Mr Harrison said.

The launch was originally set to occur Sunday evening. But soon after propellants started flowing into the rocket’s tanks, SpaceX announced that launch attempt had been scrubbed.

Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator, said during Monday night's livestream that the problem Sunday was a leak in a line that fed liquid oxygen into the rocket.

Mr Musk, in a “Nuke Mars” T-shirt, also joined the Monday broadcast with Bill Riley, the SpaceX vice president of Starship engineering, to discuss the rocket’s technical features and the motivations for building it.

The company posted on the social platform X that it was “determining the next best available opportunity to fly.”

WHAT IS STARSHIP?