The first orbital test flight of the game-changing SpaceX Starship was scrubbed Monday morning due to a frozen valve.
Starship 24, a prototype, was to lift off at around 9:20 a.m. Eastern. The Super Heavy first stage was to make a hard landing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage was to reach orbit and then make an even harder landing near Hawaii after a brief flight. In both cases, SpaceX hoped to learn what actually happens to both vehicles, as they say during the airline safety instructions, “in the event of a water landing.”
The condition of the frozen valve became known several minutes before launch. While SpaceX decided to scrub the launch with about seven minutes remaining, they continued the countdown and countdown procedures until T-minus ten seconds. The launch might not have happened, but what ended up as a wet dress rehearsal was a success.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk showed his usual brio in the face of this morning’s failure. “Learned a lot today,” he tweeted, “now offloading propellant, retrying in a few days.”
The official announcement was that the next attempt could come as soon as 48 hours from the scrub, or sometime Wednesday. That’s about the minimum amount of time to de-fuel, fix the frozen pressure valve, and then refuel. If Musk is closer to the mark with his “few days” estimate, I wouldn’t expect another attempt to get Starship 24 off the ground before Thursday, April 20.
Insert your own “four-twenty” joke here.
Musk initially rated Starship’s chances of a successful test flight at just 50%. “I’m not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement,” he said at a Morgan Stanley Conference in March, adding that the test “Won’t be boring!”
Today we didn’t even get an unsuccessful test flight, but now that the FAA has finally stopped dragging its feet granting permission for the test flight — after two years of delays — waiting for a few more days doesn’t seem too bad.
I’d just reiterate what a game-changer Starship will be after it exits testing and enters full production. The upper stage has the same internal volume as a 747 but at a fraction of the cost to manufacture. No one has ever attempted to launch anything into space capable of carrying so much mass filling up so much volume.
Musk’s plan is that the fully-reusable first and second stages will bring launch costs down to $2 million per flight. With orbital refueling — courtesy of a “gas station” model of the same vehicle — Starship will be able to put 100 tons of cargo on the Moon for virtually nothing. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), designed for the Artemis program to get us back to the Moon, delivers only 26 tons at a cost of $4.1 billion. Even if Musk is off by an order of magnitude about Starship’s eventual launch cost, it’s still a cost-cutting revolution.
It’s still a revolution if he’s off by two orders of magnitude.
As a lifelong space nut, of course, I’m disappointed with this morning’s scrub. But as someone who understands what Starship could make possible, every step of its development is still a thrill.
Recommended: Young Actors Lack ‘Mental Capacity’ to Play James Bond Says Bond Casting Director
Join the conversation as a VIP Member