SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket came within a second or so from blasting off on a test flight Thursday but some of the engines failed to start, triggering a launch abort.
Launch Details
Elon Musk’s company said it will have to figure out what went wrong before making another attempt to send Starship on a space-skimming flight halfway around the world. It was supposed to be the 13th flight for Starship, which at 407 feet tall with 33 main engines is the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
Twenty of SpaceX’s newest and most advanced Starlinks were on board Starship for release during the planned hourlong flight. The internet satellites were going to try communicating with Starlinks already in orbit while taking photos of Starship’s heat shield.
NASA Involvement
NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in the next few years. The space agency has hired SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to build and fly the lunar landers that will return humanity to the surface of the moon after an absence of more than half a century.
Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.
