SpaceX delays Starship launch in latest setback to Musk’s rocket

SpaceX delayed a critical test flight of its massive Starship rocket roughly half an hour before liftoff on Sunday, saying it needed to fix a liquid oxygen leak and that it would aim for another launch on Monday night.

Starship was set to take off on its 10th major mission from SpaceX’s South Texas launch facility, called Starbase. The mission had heightened stakes following a series of explosive setbacks this year for Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s reusable rocket.

SpaceX has been periodically launching Starship on a series of test missions designed to ready the vehicle for lofting satellites – and eventually people – to Earth’s orbit and beyond. Yet the first two flights this year blew up within minutes, a third failed to deploy dummy satellites and spun out of control, and another rocket exploded on a test stand in June during fueling.

Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill Musk’s aims to someday carry humans back to the moon and to Mars. To address the issues, SpaceX had temporarily reassigned roughly 20% of its Falcon engineering team to Starship to help with testing and reliability, Bloomberg previously reported.

Musk hinted on his social media site X that he would provide a technical update about the Starship program on Sunday, though the billionaire appeared not to go through with the event. He then said another launch would be attempted Monday after the ground side liquid oxygen leak was fixed. The tenth flight test is now listed for Aug. 25 between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. local time.

SpaceX often says it uses failures as learning opportunities that it can apply to future launches. But after a lackluster start to the year, this next mission faces extra pressure to perform.

“A successful test would almost kind of erase the challenges of the last year,” said Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and consulting firm. “An unsuccessful one is just going to add to that scrutiny and that sense of ‘what’s going on?’ ”

Advertised as the most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. It is supposed to eventually replace SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the company’s sole vehicle for launching satellites and humans to space. The eventual goal is to land and take off from the moon and Mars.

So far, however, Musk’s early projections that it would be safe to carry humans to space by 2023 and land people on the moon as early as this year haven’t panned out. SpaceX is still years away from unlocking Starship’s full power.

The delays and misfires haven’t yet appeared to deter investors: Bloomberg News has reported that SpaceX has been planning a sale of stock that would value the company at about $400 billion, the largest-ever valuation for a closely held US company.

For now, the company is trying to demonstrate that the rocket can achieve orbit, deploy satellites and return to Earth fully intact. SpaceX has so far shown on two flights that it can catch the Super Heavy booster, the massive lower portion of the rocket that lifts Starship into space.

For this mission, SpaceX doesn’t plan to catch the Super Heavy booster. Instead, it aims to test its ability to undertake maneuvers midflight before Super Heavy attempts a controlled landing offshore.