The first liftoff of Starship, the world's largest rocket, postponed

Europe 1 with AFP 15:23 p.m., April 17, 2023, modified at 16:39 p.m., April 17, 2023

The first liftoff of Starship, the world's largest rocket, will not take place Monday because of a technical problem encountered during the last minutes of preparations, SpaceX announced. The launch of this giant was planned from the Starbase space base, in the extreme south of Texas in the United States. SpaceX teams, however, continued to run the countdown and simulate takeoff operations in the form of a dress rehearsal, stopped just before the scheduled launch time.

Possible fallback dates in the week

Fallback dates are possible during the week. "We expect a minimum of 48 hours before we can retry this test flight," a SpaceX employee said during the company's live video. "A valve appears to be frozen," SpaceX boss Elon Musk tweeted earlier.

A pressurant valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon, no launch today

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 17, 2023

At 120 meters high, Starship belongs to the category of super-heavy launchers, capable of carrying more than 100 tons of cargo in orbit. Its take-off power must be more than twice that of the legendary Saturn V, the rocket of the Apollo lunar program (111 meters). It is intended for trips to the Moon and Mars.

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This black and silver behemoth, which runs on liquid oxygen and methane, has never flown in its full configuration, with its powerful first stage, called Super Heavy. Only the second stage of the vehicle, the Starship spacecraft that gives its name to the entire rocket, has carried out suborbital tests (at about 10 km altitude).

Collect data for the following prototypes

The flight plan for Monday was as follows: about three minutes after takeoff, Super Heavy was expected to break away and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship ship was then to continue its ascent alone, and make a little less than one circumnavigation of the Earth before falling back into the Pacific Ocean. But this was the "best scenario", SpaceX had said, as the outcome of the test is uncertain.

"Tomorrow will probably not be a success, if we mean reaching orbit," Elon Musk said Sunday night, speaking to his followers via Twitter. "If we see anything that worries us, we will postpone the flight," he warned. When takeoff is attempted, the billionaire simply wished that he would not destroy the launch pad.

His fear: that one of Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines will explode and cause a "domino effect" by spreading to the others. "It would surely take several months to rebuild the launch pad if we melt it," he said. The main goal is to collect as much data as possible for the following prototypes.

Fully reusable

This maiden flight was to be followed very closely by NASA. The US space agency has chosen this spacecraft to re-land, for the first time in more than half a century, its astronauts on the Moon, during the Artemis 3 mission officially scheduled for 2025. The astronauts will take off separately aboard NASA's new mega-rocket, SLS (98 meters high, with a take-off power almost half that planned for Starship).

They will travel to the Moon in the Orion capsule, and it will then dock with the Starship spacecraft, previously placed in lunar orbit. It is he who will bring the astronauts down to the surface of the Moon. Without this lunar lander, Artemis 3 will not be able to take place. In the future, the rocket must be fully reusable. Super Heavy will have to return to land against his launch tower, equipped with arms to catch him.

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The Starship will have to return to land on Earth using retrorockets. It is this maneuver that had been tried several times in 2020 and 2021. Several prototypes had then descended too quickly, and had hit the ground in impressive explosions - before one of them finally managed to land.

Break prices with the reusable launcher

The idea of a reusable launcher, Elon Musk's grand strategy, is to break prices. Each Starship flight could eventually cost only "a few million" dollars, he said Sunday. The rocket already has customers: its first crewed flight is planned in partnership with American billionaire Jared Isaacman. Another billionaire, Japan's Yusaku Maezawa, and American entrepreneur Dennis Tito (the first space tourist in history), also announced that they would board for a trip around the moon.

But for Elon Musk, Starship is above all the ship that must allow humanity to become multiplanetary: "We have an arduous road of two or three years ahead of us (...) but in the end we should have something that allows us to set up a base on the Moon and Mars."