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<\/a><\/p>\nBy Joe Skipper and Steve Gorman<\/p>\n
BOCA CHICA, Texas (Reuters) -Elon Musk’s SpaceX called off the highly anticipated debut launch of its newly combined Starship cruise vessel and Super Heavy rocket in the final minutes of countdown due to a frozen valve, delaying the uncrewed test flight for at least two days.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, was originally slated for blast-off from the SpaceX “Starbase” facility at Boca Chica, Texas, during a two-hour launch window that began at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).<\/p>\n
But the California-based company announced in a live webcast that it was scrubbing the planned 90-minute flight into space for a minimum of 48 hours, citing a frozen pressurization valve in the lower-stage rocket booster. That would make Wednesday the next available launch window for the mission.<\/p>\n
SpaceX later said on Twitter that its teams were “working towards Thursday, April 20” for a second launch attempt.<\/p>\n
The tweet set off a flurry of jokes on the social media platform making reference to 4\/20 as a date widely associated with cannabis culture, and to the notoriety Musk gained in 2018 for smoking marijuana during an appearance on a live web show.<\/p>\n
Musk, who purchased Twitter last year for $44 billion, is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX. He also is chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla, Inc.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Getting the Starship to space for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars – at least initially as part of NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis.<\/p>\n
A successful debut flight would also instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth.<\/p>\n
Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship cruise vessel it would carry to space are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to Earth for soft landings – a maneuver that has become routine for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n
But neither stage would be recovered for the expendable first test flight to space. Instead, both parts of the spacecraft would end their inaugural flight with crash landings at sea – the upper-stage of the Starship coming down in the Pacific after achieving nearly one full orbit of the Earth.<\/p>\n
Prototypes of the Starship cruise vessel have made five sub-space flights up to 6 miles (10 km) above Earth in recent years, but the Super Heavy booster has never left the ground. <\/p>\n
In February, SpaceX did a test-firing of the booster, igniting 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for roughly 10 seconds with the rocket bolted in place vertically atop a platform.<\/p>\n
The Federal Aviation Administration just last Friday granted a license for what would be the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system, clearing a final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.<\/p>\n
If all goes as planned for the next launch bid, all 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously to loft the Starship on a flight most of the way around the Earth before it re-enters the atmosphere and free-falls into the Pacific at supersonic speed, about 60 miles (97 km) off the coast of the northern Hawaiian islands.<\/p>\n
After separating from the Starship, the Super Heavy booster is expected to execute the beginnings of a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n
As designed, the Starship rocket is nearly two times more powerful than NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which made its debut uncrewed flight to orbit in November, sending a NASA cruise vessel called Orion on a 10-day voyage around the moon and back.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Boca Chica, Texas, and Joey Roulette in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Deepa Babington and Sonali Paul)<\/p>\n
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