Elon Musk's SpaceX postponed the 10th launch of its Starship rocket due to cloudy weather in Texas on Monday, another slight delay in its efforts to overcome development setbacks and achieve several long-sought milestones essential to the Mars rocket system's reusable design.
The 232-feet (71-meter) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171-feet (52-meter) tall Starship upper half, which together make it taller than New York's Statue of Liberty, sat on a launch mount at SpaceX's Starbase rocket facilities ahead of liftoff time that had been moved back a few times because of gloomy weather.
The rocket was filled with millions of pounds of propellant and set to launch when SpaceX around 8 p.m. EST (0000 GMT) opted to call off the day's launch and turn the operation into a launch rehearsal, considering the weather forecast would remain unfavorable throughout the launch window.
SpaceX will try to launch Starship on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. (2130 GMT).
A liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad had nixed a Sunday launch attempt, billionaire Musk wrote on X overnight, adding SpaceX would try again on Monday. Musk on Monday appeared on SpaceX's live stream for a brief chat about Starship's design and its role in ferrying humans to Mars.
Development of SpaceX's next-generation rocket, key to the company's powerful launch business and Musk's goal to send humans to Mars, has faced repeated hiccups this year.
Two Starship testing failures early in flight, another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a massive test stand explosion in June that sent debris flying into nearby Mexican territory have tested SpaceX's capital-intensive test-to-failure development approach, in which new iterations of rocket prototypes are flown to their technical limits.
With SpaceX's approach, testing failures early in Starship's flight prevent the company from gathering vital technical data needed to advance the rocket's design.
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