SpaceX Starship rocket. Photo: Twitter/@SpaceX
Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX has postponed the debut launch of probably the most highly effective rocket ever constructed, Starship. The uncrewed flight was scheduled to elevate off from Boca Chica in Texas at 08:20 native time (14:20 BST).
The liftoff of the next-generation and the world’s biggest rocket, which was designed to ship astronauts to Moon and Mars was referred to as off simply minutes earlier than the scheduled launch time after a pressurant valve gave the impression to be frozen within the booster stage, Elon Musk stated in a tweet.
While the launch shall be delayed by no less than 48 hours, SpaceX introduced that the crew is ‘working towards the next available opportunity’ to launch the rocket.
“It’s a very risky flight,” Mr. Musk earlier stated in a dwell occasion on Twitter Spaces on April 16. “It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.
“There’s 1,000,000 methods this rocket might fail,” he added. “We’re going to be very cautious and if we see something that provides us concern, we’ll postpone.”
Mr. Musk said he wanted to “set expectations low” because “most likely tomorrow is not going to achieve success — if by profitable one means reaching orbit.”
The U.S. space agency NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 — a mission known as Artemis III — for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
Starship consists of a 164-foot (50-metre) tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
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Collectively referred to as Starship, the spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown in combination together, although there have been several sub-orbital test flights of the spacecraft alone.
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February.
The Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.
NASA will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Also Read: SpaceX test-fires Starship booster in milestone for debut orbital launch
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refueling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
Mr. Musk said the goal is to make Starship reusable and bring down the price to a few million dollars per flight.
“In the long term — long term that means, I do not know, two or three years — we must always obtain full and fast reusability,” he said.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilization,” Mr. Musk said.
“We are at this temporary second in civilization the place it’s potential to turn into a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our aim. I believe we have got an opportunity.”.
(with AFP inputs)
