Ground system issue scrubs first launch of Space X's Starship V3 rocket - Ars Technica

Overview

Ground system issue scrubs first launch of Space X’s Starship V3 rocket

Engineers could make another attempt to launch Starship as soon as Friday evening.

Details

Space X got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.

Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around Space X’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. Space X pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before Space X called off the launch attempt.

“It is sounding like we are not going to be able to clear this issue in time today, so we are going to be standing down from a launch,” said Dan Huot, a Space X official hosting the company’s live broadcast Thursday. “We got the vehicle totally loaded. We hit a couple of different holds as we worked through that count.”

Elon Musk, Space X’s founder and CEO, attributed the scrub to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on an umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window Friday would open at 5:30 pm CDT (22:30 UTC).

The upcoming Starship test flight will mark the first liftoff from a brand new launch pad at Starbase, Texas, the one-year-old city encompassing Space X’s South Texas test site near the US-Mexico border. It will be the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster to date, and the first to employ an overhauled design Space X calls Starship Version 3. Starship V3 introduces numerous changes, including 39 more efficient, higher-thrust Raptor engines, a redesigned propulsion system, three larger grid fins to replace four smaller ones, and a reusable hot staging ring permanently attached to the top of the Super Heavy booster.

There’s a lot riding on Starship V3: NASA’s aim to land astronauts on the Moon before China, Space X’s own plans to deploy a new generation of Starlink Internet satellites and orbital data centers, and the dreams of the broader space enterprise for low-cost access to space. It also comes on the cusp of Space X’s highly-anticipated initial public offering. Starship and Super Heavy are designed for full reusability, but Space X has, so far, only reused the booster stage. The company does not plan to recover either stage of the rocket on this flight.

Space X got through most of the countdown Thursday, essentially repeating what the launch team accomplished in a recent dress rehearsal. Engineers pumped more than 11 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen into the rocket in less than 40 minutes, demonstrating a faster loading procedure than on past versions of Starship. For comparison, it takes Space X about the same amount of time to load a million pounds of propellant into its smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

When it lifts off, the 12th flight of Starship will follow a similar profile as the ones before it. But there are a few tweaks to the flight plan. The rocket will head slightly farther south over the Gulf of Mexico, running the gap between the Yucatan Peninsula and the western tip of Cuba, rather than flying over the Florida Keys.

The Super Heavy booster, itself more than 20 stories tall, will fall away from the Starship upper stage nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight before guiding itself toward a controlled splashdown off the coast of Texas. The upper stage’s six engines will give Starship enough velocity to fly halfway around the world, but not quite enough speed to reach low-Earth orbit.

Once in space, the ship will release 20 mock-ups of Space X’s next-generation Starlink satellites, plus two deployable Starlinks fitted with cameras to take pictures of the rocket’s upper stage in flight. Starship V3 features a modified payload deployment mechanism to release Starlinks at a faster rate than on Starship V2. This demonstration will help pave the way for Starship to launch operational satellites, potentially as soon as later this year, according to Space X.

Then, around 48 minutes after liftoff, Earth’s gravity will pull Starship back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. Engineers will track the performance of the heat shield during reentry before the ship reignites its engines for a final landing burn, targeting a pinpoint splashdown northwest of Australia.

Most of this should seem familiar if you’ve watched a Starship test flight before. What’s new about this launch is not where Starship will go or what it will do, but how it will fly.

“The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test,” Space X wrote on its website.

If this flight doesn’t go well, Space X has a “large pipeline of V3 ships and boosters in the factory,” Musk wrote on X. A seven-month gap since the last Starship launch “was due to the almost total redesign of the primary structure, engines, electronics and launch tower from V2,” he added.

Space X’s hardware-rich approach to rocket development means the company would likely be able to recover from a setback rather quickly. Three of five flights of Starship V2 failed last year, but Space X avoided lengthy groundings and reeled off all five launches in a period of nine months.

Musk predicted that a similar failure, if it were to occur on the next flight, would likewise have a modest effect on Starship’s schedule. But every week and month counts for the US space program’s race to the Moon, and Space X’s position as a soon-to-be public company adds an extra dash of importance to what happens with Flight 12.

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Key Takeaways

• Ground system issue scrubs first launch of Space X’s Starship V3 rocket

• Engineers could make another attempt to launch Starship as soon as Friday evening

• Space X got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day

• Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around Space X’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon

• That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff