With less than an hour to go before launch, SpaceX scrubbed the 10th launch of the Starship — the largest rocket ever to fly — on Sunday.
The scrub came as a big disappointment for the many people watching in person close to the launch site at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, as well as for those watching online. The company said it needed time “to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” and has yet to announce a new launch schedule for the 121-meter-tall rocket.
Still, much earlier in the day, at 2:45 a.m. ET, SpaceX managed to launch its 33rd commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission used SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon spacecraft carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies for the orbital outpost. Generating just 1.7 million pounds of thrust at launch — compared to the 17 million produced by the mighty Starship — the Falcon 9 may lack the spectacle of SpaceX’s next-gen rocket, but it has a level of reliability that Starship engineers are keen to match.
You can watch the Falcon 9 lift off in the video clip below:
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/aD3fKAZeHN
Around eight minutes after launch, the first-stage booster returned to a droneship waiting in the ocean just off the coast of Florida. Here’s some footage showing the booster touching down.
Falcon 9 lands on A Shortfall of Gravitas pic.twitter.com/RtepEflEpe
The perfect landing means the booster can now be refurbished and used for another flight.
Sunday’s mission marked the seventh flight of this particular booster, having previously launched O3b mPOWER-E, Crew-10, Bandwagon-3, O3b mPOWER-D, and two Starlink missions.
The Dragon will take about 28 hours to reach the space station, where it’s expected to dock on Monday at around 7:30 a.m. ET. Besides delivering food and science experiments for the crew, the capsule will also perform a reboost operation to demonstrate its ability to help sustain the station’s altitude, which slips over time.
The Dragon will remain docked at the ISS for about four months, after which it’ll return to Earth with research equipment and cargo, splashing down off the coast of California.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.