SpaceX won’t be launching its big Starship test flight today after all

Space watchers had been gearing up for an exciting evening tonight as SpaceX was set to launch its mighty Starship on its seventh test flight to date. The hope was to launch the massive rocket and have it deploy a payload for the first time, as well as facing the daunting challenge of trying to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy Booster at the launch tower in Boca Chica, Texas. However, now the test flight has been pushed back by one day due to weather conditions. The launch had been scheduled for tonight, Wednesday January 15, but SpaceX announced it would delay the flight until 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, January 16 with a 60-minute launch window. Though rockets can typically handle some adverse weather conditions such as winds and rain, high winds or the possibility of lightning strikes could cause problems for delicate electronics, so launches generally wait for clear conditions. The weather in Boca Chica today has winds and threats of rain showers, but the good news is that tomorrow’s forecast promises lower winds and just a few clouds. That indicates that the Starship should be able to launch as planned, and bodes well for the ambitious attempt to catch the rocket booster. The Starship is being developed to carry heavy loads to the moon and Mars, such as the kinds of supplies and equipment that will be needed to support NASA’s plans for human exploration of the moon. The test flights so far have seen some incredible feats, such as the first ever catching of the Starship booster, though the company wasn’t able to repeat that in the most recent flight. Each test flight has experimented with new challenges for the Starship, and the seventh flight sees a block of upgrades to the upper stage such as forward flaps which have been made smaller and moved toward the vehicle’s tip, which should allow them to do their job while experiencing less extreme heat during re-entry. There are also changes to the propellant system including a 25% increase in the volume of propellant used, and new-generation tiles used across the vehicle’s heat shield. While SpaceX hasn’t had the chance to launch its Starship today, it has been busy — it successfully launched the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost mission to the moon from Florida, using a Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX had its most successful Starship flight yet last week, achieving a list of objectives including controlled landings for both the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship spacecraft in the ocean in different parts of the world. In test flights 5, 7, and 8, SpaceX achieved the impressive feat of bringing the 71-meter-tall booster back to the launchpad at Starbase in southern Texas, using giant mechanical arms on the launch tower to secure the vehicle just above the ground. SpaceX has shared some slow-motion footage of its Starship spacecraft making a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean just over an hour after it launched from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Boca Chica in southern Texas on Tuesday. The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company shared two videos of the landing, with one of them tracking the Starship as it descended to make a controlled, soft landing on the water. SpaceX has shared some dramatic slow-motion footage (below) of the Starship rocket blasting off from the launchpad at the start of Tuesday’s successful flight.  “Liftoff of Super Heavy, the most powerful launch vehicle in history, on Starship’s tenth flight test,” SpaceX said in an online post that included the 30-second video.