Elon Musk’s SpaceX aborted a planned test flight of its Starship rocket Thursday when several of the Super Heavy booster’s engines failed to ignite during the final countdown sequence at the company’s South Texas launch facility.
Ars Technica reports that the launch attempt was halted at the Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border when the countdown clock reached zero at the scheduled 5:45 p.m. local time launch window. While preparations had proceeded smoothly throughout the day, including the loading of more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellant into the massive two-stage rocket, computers controlling the countdown triggered an automatic abort during the engine startup sequence.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk provided updates on the situation through his social media platform X. “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” Musk wrote. “Now offloading propellant. Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days.” He later indicated that the company would not attempt a launch during the next available window on Friday evening, and confirmed that ground crews would replace two of the Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. “Most probable launch timing is early next week,” Musk added.
The Super Heavy booster is equipped with 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines, each producing more than half a million pounds of thrust. According to graphics shown on SpaceX’s live video stream, four of these 33 engines never ignited during the startup sequence. The engines are designed to ignite in a staggered pattern after the launch pad’s water-cooled flame diverter activates, a system intended to protect the facility from extreme heat and vibrations during liftoff of what is currently the world’s most powerful rocket.
This planned test flight represents the 13th full-scale Starship launch and the second to utilize SpaceX’s upgraded Starship Version 3 rocket equipped with third-generation Raptor 3 engines. The new engine design previously flew on a test flight in May, which company officials described as mostly successful despite in-flight issues with the Raptor 3 engines. However, the startup sequence during that earlier launch proceeded without problems.
The current Flight 13 mission carries particular significance as SpaceX aims to address several technical challenges encountered during Flight 12 two months ago. According to SpaceX’s recap of the May launch, “At stage separation on Flight 12, slight differences in engine startup on the ship caused the directional flip of the booster to be off by approximately 90 degrees.” The company modified the startup sequence to be more resilient to timing variations and more reliably execute the flip maneuver in the correct direction.
Additional complications during the previous test flight included the failure of several booster engines to reignite during the landing burn phase, preventing a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Successfully completing this maneuver on Flight 13 would represent a critical milestone toward returning reusable Super Heavy boosters to the launch site. While SpaceX has already demonstrated this capability with Starship Version 2, the feat has not yet been accomplished with the Version 3 configuration.
The upper stage also experienced engine troubles during Flight 12, with one of its six Raptor engines shutting down prematurely. Despite this failure, the spacecraft continued toward a precision water landing in the Indian Ocean, though SpaceX had to cancel a planned attempt to reignite a Raptor engine in space. This in-space engine restart remains one of the major objectives SpaceX hopes to achieve on Flight 13.
In response to the launch failure, shares of SpaceX have fallen three percent in pre-market trading on Friday.
Read more at Ars Technica here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship