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SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket came within a second of blasting off on a test flight Thursday, but some of the engines failed to ignite, triggering a launch abort amid billowing clouds of smoke and vapour.
Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, said two engines will be replaced “to be confident of a good flight” before sending Starship from Texas on a space-skimming journey halfway around the world.
It will be the 13th flight for Starship, which at 124 metres tall with 33 main engines is the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
SpaceX’s launch webcast showed engine ignition beginning three seconds before the planned liftoff, viewed from a drone high above the pad.
Although the company did not elaborate, onscreen data showed four engines failing to fire, with the remaining 29 immediately shutting down and keeping the rocket anchored to the pad. It was the first time a full-scale Starship experienced a last-second abort.
The launch team immediately began draining fuel from the rocket.
“Most probable launch timing is early next week,” Musk said via X.
Everything was going SpaceX’s way, even the weather, until the partial engine failure.
The rocket’s automatic launch system worked as planned by halting everything — too few operating engines could have doomed the launch. Some earlier Starship flights ended in explosive fireballs.
Musk’s most advanced Starlinks aboard
Twenty of SpaceX’s newest and most advanced Starlinks were on board for release during the planned hour-long flight from Starbase, the company’s hub near the Texas-Mexico border.
The internet satellites were to attempt communicating with Starlinks already in orbit while photographing Starship’s heat shield.
Neither the first-stage booster nor the spacecraft were meant to be recovered, with both ending up in the sea.
Putting astronauts back on the moon
NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon within the next few years.
The space agency has hired SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to build and fly the lunar landers that will return humanity to the moon’s surface after an absence of more than half a century.
Both companies need their landers — Starship and Blue Moon — ready to fly by next year so that the newly named Artemis III crew can practise docking their capsule with them in orbit around Earth.
The mission after that — Artemis IV, planned for no earlier than 2028 — would use one of those landers to take two astronauts to the moon’s south polar region.