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Starbase (United States) (AFP) – Elon Musk’s aerospace transportation company has postponed the first Starship test flight it had planned for today, Monday, April 17. It is the efficient rocket designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
The takeoff was suspended minutes before the scheduled time due to a pressurization problem in the drive stage, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said a pressure valve appeared to be frozen, forcing the postponement of a scheduled 1:20 p.m. (GMT) launch from Starbase, SpaceX’s spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
“We anticipate a minimum of 48 hours before we can attempt this test flight again,” a SpaceX employee said in a live video broadcast by the company.
In any case, dates were set for upcoming tests during the week.
Musk had said on Sunday, during an event on the Twitter Spaces network, that “it is a very risky flight.” “It is the first launch of a very complex and gigantic rocket,” he noted.
“There are a million ways in which this rocket can fail. We are going to be very careful and if we see anything that worries us, we will postpone it,” he had advanced.
super rocket
The US space agency NASA chose the Starship spacecraft to take astronauts to the Moon at the end of 2025 – in a mission named Artemis III – for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
With its height of 120 meters, Starship belongs to the category of super-heavy launchers, capable of transporting more than 100 tons of cargo to orbit. Its takeoff power must be more than double that of the legendary Saturn V, the rocket of the famous Apollo lunar program (111 meters).
Starship consists of a reusable capsule about 50 meters high that carries the team and the cargo located on top of the first stage Super Heavy propellant, about 70 meters.
The spacecraft and Super Heavy booster have never flown in combination; however, several suborbital flight trials of the spacecraft have already been conducted.
The original plan calls for the Super Heavy booster to be detached from the ship within three minutes of launch for splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship, which has six of its own engines, will continue to an altitude of about 240 km, completing almost one orbit around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.
“If it gets to orbit, that’s going to be a huge success,” Musk said Sunday.
“If we get far enough away from the platform before something goes wrong, then I think I could call it a success,” added the mogul.
“The payload of this mission is information. Information that will improve the design of future Starship builds,” Musk explained. “
the next civilization
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of all 33 Raptor engines in Starship’s first-stage booster in February.
NASA will carry astronauts into lunar orbit in November 2024, using its own rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which is more than a decade in development.
But Starship is bigger and more powerful than the SLS.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice the amount of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX hopes to put one Starship into orbit and resupply it with another so it can continue its journey to Mars or beyond.
Musk clarified that the goal is to make Starship reusable to reduce the cost of missions to just a few million dollars per flight.
“Long term, taking long term, I don’t know, two or three years, we’re going to have to get full and rapid reuse,” he said.
Eventually, the goal is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humanity on the “path of being a multiplanetary civilization,” Musk said.
“We are at that brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planetary species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we have a chance.”
