SpaceX called off a planned test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday night, stopping the countdown just minutes before takeoff due to a technical problem with ground systems.
The launch was scheduled for 6:30 pm local time from the company’s Starbase facility in southern Texas, near Brownsville. Propellant loading had just started when the mission was suddenly aborted. Confirming the delay, SpaceX announced, “Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems.”
This scrub marks another in a series of setbacks for Elon Musk’s massive rocket, which has faced repeated test failures over the past several months. The much-anticipated 10th test flight was expected to be a critical milestone for both Musk’s long-term vision of sending humans to Mars and NASA’s lunar ambitions, as the agency is depending on Starship to land astronauts on the Moon.
Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, underlined the pressure surrounding this launch, saying, “The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been for a Starship launch. If they have another failure, they still have more room to continue iterating and trying, but they are running out of room.”
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SpaceX has not given a new date for the flight. However, if engineers are able to quickly resolve the ground system issue, the company could try again as early as Monday evening, when a one-hour launch window opens at 7:30 pm Eastern.
