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Agence France-Presse

SpaceX on Monday postponed the first test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars and beyond.
Lift-off of the gigantic rocket was called off just minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time because of a pressurisation issue in the booster stage, SpaceX said.
Musk tweeted at 1311 GMT that a “pressurant valve” on the SpaceX rocket “appears to be frozen”. Minutes later, SpaceX tweeted that the company was “standing down from today’s flight test attempt”.
The SpaceX “team is working towards next available opportunity”, the company added.
“Learned a lot today, now offloading propellant, retrying in a few days …” Musk said.
The launch had been planned for 8:20am Central Time (1320 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX said the launch would be delayed for at least 48 hours. The flight had been expected to last about 90 minutes.


The US space agency Nasa has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025, a mission known as Artemis III, for the first time since the Apollo programme ended in 1972.
Starship consists of a 50-metre (164 feet) tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits on top of a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February, but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown together.
The test flight is intended to test their performance in combination. Musk had warned ahead of the test that a delay was likely. “It’s a very risky flight,” he said. “It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.

“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail. We’re going to be very careful and if we see anything that gives us concern, we’ll postpone.”
Nasa will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refuelling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
Musk said the goal is to make Starship reusable and bring down the price to a few million dollars per flight.
To get to Mars, SpaceX first needs Starship to launch
“In the long run- long run meaning, I don’t know, two or three years – we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilisation”, Musk said.
“We are at this brief moment in civilisation where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.”
Additional reporting by dpa


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Company founder Elon Musk tweeted that a valve on rocket ‘appears to be frozen’, shortly before SpaceX said it was ‘standing down from flight test attempt’
Flight, scheduled to be launched from site in Texas, had been expected to last about 90 minutes


Company founder Elon Musk tweeted that a valve on rocket ‘appears to be frozen’, shortly before SpaceX said it was ‘standing down from flight test attempt’.


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