SpaceX postponed the first Starship test flight on Monday, the most powerful rocket ever built and designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. According to SpaceX, the takeoff was interrupted minutes before the scheduled time due to a pressure problem in the propellant stage.

So said SpaceX founder Elon Musk a pressure valve seemed to be frozen, which had to postpone the scheduled launch at 1320 GMT) from Starbase, SpaceX’s spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. “We expect at least 48 hours before we can try this test flight again.pointed out a SpaceX employee in a live video broadcast from the company.

In any case, dates were set for upcoming tests during the week, something Musk had already thought about. Musk said this at an event on the Twitter Spaces network on Sunday “It is a very risky flight”. “It’s the first launch of a very complex and gigantic rocket,” he said.

“There are a million ways this rocket could fail. We are going to be very careful and if we see something that worries us, we will postpone it,” he had advanced.

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super rocket

The American space agency NASA selected the Starship spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon at the end of 2025 -in a mission called 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 carrying more than 100 tons of cargo to orbit. Its take-off power should 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 which carries the team and payload atop the Super Heavy propellant of the first stage, about 70 meters.

The spacecraft and Super Heavy booster have never flown in combination, but several suborbital flight tests of the spacecraft have already been conducted. Under the original plan, the Super Heavy booster is to detach from the ship within three minutes of launch in order to land in the Gulf of Mexico.

Starship, which has six of its own engines, will continue to an altitude of about 150 miles, almost completing one orbit around Earth before plunging into the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch. “If it gets into orbit, it will be a huge success,” Musk said on Sunday.

“If we get far enough away from the platform before something goes wrong then I think I can call it a success,” the mogul added. “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”

“The payload of this mission is information. Information that will help us improve the design of future Starship builds,” Musk explained. “

“Multiplanetary Civilization”

SpaceX conducted a successful test of all 33 Raptor engines in Starship’s first stage booster in February.

NASA will launch astronauts into lunar orbit in November 2024 using its own rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade. But Starship is bigger and more powerful than the SLS.

It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice as much as the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the moon. SpaceX hopes to launch a spaceship 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.

“In the long run, in the long run, I don’t know, two or three years, we’re going to have to achieve full and rapid reuse,” he said.

Ultimately, the goal is to establish bases on the moon and Mars and put humanity on the “path of a multiplanetary civilization,” Musk said.

“We’re at that close point in civilization where it’s possible to become a multi-planetary species,” he said. “That is our goal. I think we have a chance.”