Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Billionaire Elon Musk-led SpaceX on August 25 postponed the 10th test flight of its huge rocket Starship due to a ground systems issue. The Elon Musk led space agency called off a planned test flight of its Starship rocket on August 24 night, just minutes before launch, citing a technical problem with ground systems.
The Starship Flight 10 launch was scheduled from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas at 7:30 p.m. EDT. However, just 17 minutes before the launch window, the company called things off. “Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” SpaceX shared in a post on social media platform X.
While SpaceX did not immediately announce a new target date, it does have backup days available till August 26. However, the cancellation marked another setback for Musk’s giant rocket, which has faced repeated failures in recent months.
To date, Starship has performed nine test missions. But the last three, which lifted off this year — in January, March, and May– experienced serious problems. On Flight 7 and Flight 8, the Ship exploded less than 10 minutes after launch, while on Flight 9, it broke apart upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. In a blog post, Space wrote that Flight 10 was planned after probing previous faults and making changes.
