Space X to re-attempt Starship rocket launch tonight

SpaceX Starship stands on the launch pad. 25 August
Reuters

Space X will attempt to launch its super heavy booster rocket, Starship tonight after it was postponed on Monday night due to weather conditions at its starbase in Texas, United States.

The rocket was originally scheduled to launch on Sunday but was shelved due to a liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad. 

Owner Elon Musk, took to X to announce this postponement with the new date and time slated for Tuesday evening 7:30pm local time. 

Development of SpaceX's next-generation rocket, key to the company's powerful launch business and Musk's goal to send humans to Mars, has faced repeated hiccups this year.

Two Starship testing failures early in flight, another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a massive test stand explosion in June that sent debris flying into nearby Mexican territory.

On its flight, the starship was expected to deploy Space X’s more advanced V3  Starlink satellites, with each launch adding more than “20x the network capacity of current Falcon 99 flights” according to a post on the company’s X account. 

The 232-feet (71-metres) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171-feet (52-metres) tall Starship upper half, which together make it taller than New York's Statue of Liberty. 

NASA hopes to use the rocket as soon as 2027 for its first crewed moon landing since the Apollo program.

Whenever Starship can launch, the rocket system will lift off from Texas and separate in half dozens of miles in altitude, with its Super Heavy booster returning for a water landing off the Texas coast, while Starship ignites its own engines to blast further into space.

Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, into space.

"In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours," Musk said on Sunday, replying to a user on X.

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