We’ll all have to wait at least one more day to see the most powerful rocket ever built take to the skies — even “Starships” singer Nicki Minaj.
SpaceX tried to launch its new Starship V3 megarocket for the first time ever this evening (May 21), from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas. Technical issues cropped up late in the countdown, however, and SpaceX couldn’t resolve them in time to get Starship V3 off the ground.
“We’re learning about a lot about these systems as we execute them for the first time, and we’re not able to basically troubleshoot all of these issues in those final seconds to get to launch,” Dan Huot, of SpaceX communications, said during the company’s launch webcast today.
“That essentially makes this a wet dress rehearsal,” he added, referring to a common preflight fueling test. “We were able to fully load the vehicles, and we’re going to take the time now, figure out what tripped us up before launch, and then actually get into a flight tomorrow.”
As that comment indicates, the next opportunity for a liftoff is Friday evening (May 22), likely in the same window as today’s try — 6:30 p.m. EDT to 8 p.m. EDT (2230 to 0000 GMT).
The scrub was doubtless disappointing for many space fans, including Minaj, who was on hand at Starbase for today’s launch attempt.
“This is historic. This is a major moment, y’all,” Minaj said during SpaceX’s launch webcast, adding that she’s never seen a launch in person before.
Minaj wore a SpaceX Starship T-shirt for the launch. “I love this shirt,” she said. “And it’s a great name — Starship!” (One of Minaj’s most famous songs is “Starships,” from the 2012 Album “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.”)
Starship is a fully reusable vehicle consisting of two stages — a giant booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.
SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity colonize the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink megaconstellation in Earth orbit and do pretty much everything else the company wants to do in the final frontier.
The megarocket remains in the development phase, however. It debuted in April 2023 and has flown 10 more test flights since then, all of them suborbital. The next launch will be the 12th for the program overall but the first for Starship V3 (“Version 3”), a dramatic overhaul designed to take the vehicle a giant step closer to operational status. It will also be the first liftoff for Starbase’s Pad 2, which features many upgrades over the site’s original pad as well.
V3 is the first iteration of Starship capable of flying to the moon and Mars, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said. If all goes according to plan, it’s the variant that will fly on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission — a docking test in Earth orbit — in mid to late 2027. And it’s the vehicle that will land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 4 in late 2028.
There’s competition for those flights, however: NASA is also considering using Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, and will probably go with whichever vehicle is ready (though the agency has said both landers might fly on Artemis 3).
On Thursday, SpaceX even announced a more ambitious crewed test flight for Starship: The world’s first private trip to Mars.
In a video, SpaceX announced that cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who financed a private polar spaceflight with SpaceX on a Dragon capsule called Fram2 in 2025, will lead a flyby around Mars sometime in the future.
“So it’s going to be a flyby mission of Mars,” Wang said. “A lot of people talk about Mars. We like Mars, we’re gonna land on Mars. We’re gonna do a city on Mars. But let’s get it started with a flyby.”
Liftoff seemed tantalizingly close multiple times today. The countdown clock reached its built-in hold at T-40 seconds, then rolled past that mark several times before an issue cropped up and caused a reset. One such issue concerned the water diverter under the launch pad, according to Huot.
SpaceX called the launch off today around 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT). There were still more than 20 minutes left in the launch window, but that wasn’t the issue.
SpaceX can hold at T-40 seconds for just a few minutes; after that, propellant temperatures rise too much to ensure nominal liftoff conditions, Huot explained.
