SpaceX scrubbed the seventh Starship test flight on Thursday after several Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster failed to ignite during the countdown. The launch was aborted automatically as the count reached zero at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. Engineers began draining propellant, and Elon Musk confirmed that two engines will be replaced before the next attempt, likely early next week.
Engine issues prompt launch abort
The launch team had loaded more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen into the 400-foot-tall rocket ahead of a planned 5:45 pm local time liftoff. The countdown proceeded smoothly until the engine startup sequence, when the onboard computers detected that some of the 33 Raptor engines on the first stage did not ignite. A graphic on SpaceX's live stream indicated that four engines were marked as not started. Musk posted on X that the automatic abort was triggered by the startup failure and that propellant offloading was underway.
Raptor 3 engines under scrutiny
Flight 13 was the second mission to use SpaceX's upgraded third-generation Raptor engine and the Starship Version 3 rocket. The first V3 flight in May saw a clean engine startup on the pad but experienced in-flight issues, including a premature shutdown of one of the upper stage's six engines. That mission also saw the booster's landing burn partially fail when some engines did not reignite, preventing a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX has implemented modifications to the engine startup sequence to address the timing variability that caused the booster to flip incorrectly during stage separation on the previous flight.
Unfinished objectives from Flight 12
The company had several goals for Flight 13, including a successful booster landing burn and an in-space engine reignition attempt that was skipped on the last test. The Starship upper stage overcame an engine failure on Flight 12 to achieve a precise water landing in the Indian Ocean, but the planned relight of a Raptor engine in space was abandoned. A successful flight would bring SpaceX closer to orbital operations, enabling Starlink satellite deployments and orbital refueling tests that are critical for NASA's Artemis lunar lander program.