SpaceX's Latest Starship Launch Is Called Off at the Last Second

SpaceX's thirteenth Starship test flight never got off the ground on Thursday evening. Automatic safety systems stopped the launch right at zero — around 6:45 p.m. Eastern time — just as the rocket's engines were starting to fire. The giant rocket, called Starship, was left standing safely on its launchpad at SpaceX's Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas. Workers then began the slow process of draining fuel from the vehicle.

SpaceX spokesperson Dan Hewitt explained what happened during a live video stream of the launch attempt. 'We got all the way down to startup, triggered a hold on the booster, and that shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite,' he said. He added: 'No Starship launch today. We'll dig in with the teams and figure out when our next attempt is going to be.' If no major repairs are needed, SpaceX could make another try as soon as Friday.

Flight 13 was supposed to follow a path very similar to the one flown during Flight 12. The rocket would travel into space, but not go all the way into orbit. After climbing high above Earth, the bottom section — called the Super Heavy booster — would separate and fly back down to splash into the Gulf of Mexico. During Flight 12, the booster missed that water landing, so SpaceX is eager to try again.

The top part of the rocket, called Starship, would keep flying on its own curved path through space. Once there, it was going to release 20 Starlink satellites into space. These satellites were only expected to survive for about 20 minutes before burning up as they fell back into Earth's atmosphere. During that short time, some of them would take photos of Starship's heat shield and send the images back to mission controllers on the ground.

This version of Starship is called 'V3,' which stands for version 3. It includes many design improvements over earlier models, and Flight 12 was the very first time a V3 Starship flew. On Flight 13, Starship was also going to try reigniting one of its six Raptor engines for a short burn — something that was planned for Flight 12 but had to be canceled when one of the engines shut down too early.

Whenever Flight 13 finally launches, the mission is planned to last about one hour from liftoff to splashdown. Starship would end its journey by splashing down in a distant part of the Indian Ocean, north of Australia. SpaceX engineers will keep working to make each flight go more smoothly than the one before it.

SpaceX has big plans for Starship in the future. The company wants it to become its main rocket, eventually replacing the Falcon 9, which SpaceX uses today for most of its missions. Starship can carry up to 100 metric tons of cargo into orbit, which means it can launch far more Starlink satellites at once than a Falcon 9 can.

NASA is also counting heavily on Starship's success. As part of its Artemis program, the space agency hopes to use a special moon-landing version of Starship to bring astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as 2028. That would be the first time humans have walked on the moon in more than 50 years. However, a watchdog report from March found that SpaceX is behind schedule on NASA's tight timeline.

NASA is not putting all its hopes in one place — it is also helping to pay for a lunar lander being built by another company called Blue Origin. Before either lander goes to the moon, NASA's Artemis III mission — a crewed flight planned for before the end of next year — will test key skills in low-Earth orbit. For that mission, NASA's Orion crew capsule is supposed to dock, or connect, with a Starship in space. But SpaceX still needs to prove that Starship can reach orbit at all, which means many more test flights are ahead.