SpaceX aborts Starship launch after engine ignition problem

SpaceX aborted the 13th Starship test flight moments before liftoff after some engines failed to ignite. The company is investigating the issue before another launch attempt. NASA continues to rely on Starship for its future Artemis missions to the Moon

Washington: SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket came within a second or so of blasting off on a test flight, but some of the engines failed to start, triggering a launch abort.

Elon Musk’s company said it will have to determine what went wrong before making another attempt to send Starship on a space-skimming flight halfway around the world. It was supposed to be the 13th flight for Starship, which, at 407 feet (124 metres) tall with 33 main engines, is the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.

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SpaceX’s launch webcast on Thursday showed the start of engine ignition three seconds before the planned liftoff, viewed from a drone high above the pad. The engines that fired abruptly shut down, with the rocket remaining anchored to the pad. The launch team immediately began draining the fuel from the rocket.

“Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” Musk announced on X.

Everything had been going SpaceX’s way, including the weather, until the partial engine ignition.

Twenty of SpaceX’s newest and most advanced Starlink satellites were on board Starship for release during the planned hour-long flight. The internet satellites were expected to communicate with Starlinks already in orbit while taking photos of Starship’s heat shield. Neither the first-stage booster nor the spacecraft was meant to be recovered, with both ending up in the sea.

NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in 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 surface of the moon after an absence of more than half a century.

Both companies need to have 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.