SpaceX Scrubs Wings Starship Rocket Record-Setting Flight Effort

A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship spaceship was ready for a rocket toward the stratosphere in its most ambitious test flight yet on Tuesday. But just 1.3 seconds before the lift off, at 4:35 p.m. CT, the Raptor engines left the launch automatically.

With only 25 minutes left in its launch window, SpaceX said it stood down from any further efforts on Tuesday. The company may retry CT (between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.) on Wednesdays or Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, had previously predicted a 2-in-3 chance that a test flight would fail. Musk Said Last week for that prototype “a lot of things need to go right”, called Starship serial no. 8, or SN8, to swim intact land.

That’s because this is the toughest test flight SpaceX has ever tried for a starship. The vehicle was designed for a roar of about 41,000 feet or 7.8 miles (12.5 kilometers) in the air above SpaceX’s expansion facilities in Boca Chika, Texas.

The SN8 also represents the most advanced starship prototype the company has ever launched. It towers 16 stories, uses three car-sized Raptor rocket engines, and comes with wing straps to move through the atmosphere. (SpaceX is not yet ready to test the 23-story booster that will eventually help launch the spaceship into orbit.)

One day, the Starship-Super Heavy Launch system could reduce space costs by up to 1,000 times.

If Musk’s vision for the Starship system is right, the spaceship could one day take humans to Mars and help build an independent Martian city.

It was not immediately clear why the engines left the test flight. The previous starship “hops” – smaller versions hovering a few hundred feet in the air – resulted in destroyed prototypes or, as on May 29, catastrophic explosion.

A grain-silo-like prototype in August Gust, S.N. Successfully flew 492 feet (150 m) in the air using a single Raptor engine in the same size as 8 and landed on the downgrade.

This is a developing story.