San Francisco Frontiers - SpaceX postpones highly anticipated Starship launch

The company is now eyeing Friday for another take-off attempt of the third generation of its mammoth rocket, company spokesperson Dan Huot said on the launch livestream.

The trial mission comes amid high stakes for the space company eyeing a blockbuster initial public offering.

After several rounds of stopping and starting the countdown clock, Huot said engineers would not be able to work through last-minute glitches in time to lift off Thursday.

Musk quickly posted on X that "the hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract."

"If that can be fixed tonight," the company will make another attempt at 5:30 pm local time (2230 GMT) on Friday, the tech titan added.

The thwarted attempt at the south Texas launchpad comes one day after SpaceX filed with US financial regulators to go public, likely in June, in what is expected to become a record initial public offering.

The IPO filing provides potential investors with detailed financial information, risk factors and business strategy.

The launch will eventually offer a live-streamed look at SpaceX's progress in developing its enormous Starship rocket, a key component of its own ambitious plans as well as US space agency NASA's program to return to the Moon.

It will be the 12th Starship flight, but the first in seven months.

The latest design is bigger than its predecessor, standing at just over 407 feet (124 meters) when fully stacked.

The company, which aims to make Starship a fully reusable system, says the mission's primary goal is to demonstrate its redesigns in flight.

It's planned that the so-called "Super Heavy" booster will splash into the water off the coast.

The upper stage is to deploy a payload of 20 mock satellites and two "specially modified Starlink satellites" outfitted with cameras, which will analyze the spacecraft's heat shield.

The test mission is meant to last approximately 65 minutes after liftoff, as the upper stage cruises on a suborbital trajectory and eventually splashes down in the Indian Ocean, if all goes to plan.

The most recent Starship missions have gone down as successful.

But previous tests have ended in spectacular explosions, including twice over the Caribbean and once after reaching space. Last June, the upper stage blew up in a ground test.

- 'Huge' stakes -

The test flight comes at a clutch moment for SpaceX, both as Musk plans the buzzy IPO and NASA eagerly awaits development of a viable lunar lander.

SpaceX is under contract with NASA to produce a modified version of Starship to serve as a landing system.

The US space agency's Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon, as China forges ahead with a rival effort that's targeting 2030 for its first crewed mission.

And given private sector delays, anxiety is rising within President Donald Trump's administration that the United States might not get there first.

Physicist G. Scott Hubbard, a former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, told AFP "there's a lot riding" on the latest SpaceX Starship test.

"The government made the decision to go with these arms-length contracts for the human landing system, and now these people have to perform."

Both SpaceX and rival Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned firm also vying to develop a lunar lander, have realigned their strategies to prioritize projects related to Moon missions.

NASA is aiming to test an in-orbit rendezvous between the spacecraft and one or two lunar landers in 2027, and carry out a crewed lunar landing before the end of 2028.

But a lot needs to happen before then -- and industry experts have voiced repeated skepticism that SpaceX and Blue Origin can achieve benchmarks in time.

A major hurdle is proving in-orbit refueling capabilities with super-cooled propellant -- an essential but untested step for carrying out deep-space missions.

"Let's hope they succeed," Hubbard said, "but it's a major engineering challenge."

NASA is scheduled to give an update on their lunar exploration plans Tuesday.

W.Thompson--SFF