SpaceX was forced to call off the planned launch of its Starship rocket in Texas on Monday because of poor weather, marking the latest setback for the company.
The 71-metre Super Heavy booster and its 52-metre Starship upper stage, together taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty, had been scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site at 7.30pm local time. The attempt was abandoned at the last moment.
“Standing down from today’s flight test attempt due to weather,” the company said on X, the social media platform also owned by Elon Musk.
The cancelled launch came a day after a separate attempt was halted because of a liquid oxygen leak at the launchpad, Musk said on X.
Starship is central to SpaceX’s ambition to create a fully reusable rocket system and to Musk’s longer-term goal of sending humans to Mars.
The programme has faced repeated delays this year, complicating plans by Nasa, which hopes to use Starship as soon as 2027 for its first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo missions.
The rocket is also critical to the future of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, the company’s largest source of revenue. Starship is designed to carry much larger batches of satellites than the Falcon 9 rocket, which has been used so far.
Despite the setbacks, Musk struck an optimistic note.
“In about six or seven years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours,” he said on Sunday in response to a user on X.
