Launch Tower Issue Scrubs First Starship V3 Flight Attempt

SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.

Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket. That was true until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.

“It is sounding like we are not going to be able to clear this issue in time today, so we are going to be standing down from a launch,” said Dan Huot, a SpaceX official hosting the company’s live broadcast Thursday. “We got the vehicle totally loaded. We hit a couple of different holds as we worked through that count.”

Elon Musk attributed the scrub to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on an umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window Friday would open at 5:30 pm CDT (22:30 UTC).

The upcoming Starship test flight will mark the first liftoff from a brand new launch pad at Starbase, Texas. It will be the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster to date, and the first to employ an overhauled design SpaceX calls Starship Version 3. Starship V3 introduces numerous changes, including 39 more efficient, higher-thrust Raptor engines, a redesigned propulsion system, three larger grid fins to replace four smaller ones, and a reusable hot staging ring permanently attached to the top of the Super Heavy booster.

There’s a lot riding on Starship V3: NASA’s aim to land astronauts on the Moon before China, SpaceX’s own plans to deploy a new generation of Starlink Internet satellites and orbital data centers, and the dreams of the broader space enterprise for low-cost access to space. It also comes on the cusp of SpaceX’s highly-anticipated initial public offering. Starship and Super Heavy are designed for full reusability, but SpaceX has, so far, only reused the booster stage. The company does not plan to recover either stage of the rocket on this flight.

SpaceX got through most of the countdown Thursday, essentially repeating what the launch team accomplished in a recent dress rehearsal. Engineers pumped more than 11 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen into the rocket in less than 40 minutes, demonstrating a faster loading procedure than on past versions of Starship. For comparison, it takes SpaceX about the same amount of time to load a million pounds of propellant into its smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

When it lifts off, the 12th flight of Starship will follow a similar profile as the ones before it, with a few tweaks. The rocket will head slightly farther south over the Gulf of Mexico, running the gap between the Yucatan Peninsula and the western tip of Cuba, rather than flying over the Florida Keys. The Super Heavy booster, itself more than 20 stories tall, will fall away from the Starship upper stage nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight before guiding itself toward a controlled splashdown off the coast of Texas. The upper stage’s six engines will give Starship enough velocity to fly halfway around the world.