SpaceX is set to attempt the tenth launch of its massive Starship rocket from Texas on Monday, as Elon Musk’s team looks to move past earlier setbacks and hit key milestones crucial to making the Mars-bound rocket fully reusable.
The 232-foot (71-meter) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171-foot tall Starship upper half – together taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty – sat stacked on a launch mount at SpaceX’s Starbase rocket facilities ahead of a 7:30 p.m. ET liftoff time.
Repeated Hiccups
A liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad nixed a Sunday launch attempt, billionaire Musk wrote on X overnight, adding SpaceX would try again on Monday. It was unclear whether Musk intended to give a pre-launch Starship talk that had been planned but cancelled on Sunday.
Development of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, key to the company’s powerful launch business and Musk’s goal to send humans to Mars, has faced repeated hiccups this year.
Musk The Soothsayer?
NASA hopes to use the rocket as soon as 2027 for its first crewed moon landing since the Apollo programme. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue, is also tied to Starship’s success. Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, into space.
“In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours,” Musk said on Sunday, replying to a user on X.
Different Approach
This year, two Starship testing failures early in flight, another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a massive test stand explosion in June that sent debris flying into nearby Mexican territory have tested SpaceX’s capital-intensive test-to-failure development approach, in which new iterations of rocket prototypes are flown to their technical limits.
That ethos is markedly different from SpaceX’s rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket made an operational debut in January following years of on-the-ground development and testing. The new Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had a similar upbringing before its 2024 debut.
With SpaceX’s approach, testing failures early in Starship’s flight prevent the company from gathering vital technical data needed to advance the rocket’s design.
Still, SpaceX, which Musk expects to record around $15.5 billion in revenue this year, has continued to swiftly produce new Starships for test flights at Starbase, a sprawling and rapidly growing rocket industrial complex. The area was made a municipality in May by local voters, many of them SpaceX workers.
More Capable
Starship’s setbacks underscore the technical complexities of the latest iteration. The ship is packed with far more capabilities than predecessor models such as increased thrust, a potentially more resilient heat shield and stronger steering flaps crucial to nailing its atmospheric reentry – key traits of its rapidly reusable design that Musk has long pushed for.
SpaceX has a lengthy to-do list for Starship’s development before the rocket begins routine missions envisioned by Musk. That includes demonstrating safe returns from space, payload deployments in orbit and complex in-space propellant refuelings crucial to its moon mission assignments from NASA.
On Monday, the rocket system will launch from Texas and separate in half dozens of miles in altitude, with its Super Heavy booster returning for a water landing off the Texas coast while Starship ignites its own engines to blast further into space.
In space, Starship will attempt to deploy mock Starlink satellites and reignite an engine along its suborbital path around the globe. Atmospheric reentry over the Indian Ocean will test its exterior steering flaps and an array of experimental heat shield tiles as the ship blazes through intense friction and heat.
(With inputs from Reuters)
