The countdown continued as SpaceX practiced fuelling the rocket but did not launch it in a procedure known as a wet dress rehearsal.

Before the lift-off was aborted, an engineer working on a reusable rocket for a company in Beijing said a successful launch would give the United States at least a 20-year edge in the rocket industry and boost China’s investment in the private space sector and reusable rockets.

“I’m really impressed by the fact that both stages of Starship are reusable, which can dramatically reduce launch costs. In China, we are still working to fully master first-stage reusability,” the engineer said, declining to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Powered by liquid oxygen and methane, Starship has 33 Raptor engines for its first-stage booster and six for its upper-stage flight, with a take-off thrust that would “put its propulsion system to test”, the Beijing-based rocket engineer said.

“Starship has the most complex propulsion system in the world. When 33 engines are at work simultaneously, they release an enormous amount of energy and put the rocket materials and manufacturing techniques through an ordeal,” he said.

Also before the postponement, astrophysicist Quentin Parker from Hong Kong University said his colleagues were very excited about the launch.

“Starship’s shiny look, gigantic size, heavy-lift capacity, and full reusability make it incredibly impressive for a private company – not national space agencies in the US, Europe, or China – to accomplish,” said Parker, who leads the university’s Laboratory for Space Research.

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Historic nighttime landing for China’s Shenzhou-14 crew after Tiangong space station mission

Historic nighttime landing for China’s Shenzhou-14 crew after Tiangong space station mission

Amateur space fans in China are also impressed by the scale of the project.

“Once Starship makes it, it will open up a new window for the future of human civilisation,” a Weibo user wrote.

A parent from Yunnan said Musk was an inspiration for others.

“When we worry about what to eat and what to wear every day, and which after-school classes to send our kids to, there are people like Musk who put aside all earthly things to go after the stars,” the parent wrote online.

China’s new aerospace programme in price war on SpaceX reusable rockets

Musk said last week on his Twitter account that the test’s success rate was 50 per cent.

The ultimate goal, Musk said, was for the booster to fly up to 20 times per day and the ship up to five times per day to deliver a total of one megaton of cargo and people to Mars for the planet to become self-sustaining. But the feasibility of refuelling remained unclear.

“Starship won’t change our lives immediately, in the sense that the technology used to launch objects into space has not changed much,” Parker said.

However, what Musk had achieved in recent years, such as using his partially reusable Falcon rockets to send astronauts to the International Space Station, was really astonishing, he said.

“It’s a huge inspiration that an individual with the drive, vision, and capacity can achieve what he has achieved,” Parker said.