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The decision to scrub the launch came just minutes before launch when a valve froze.

A new effort won’t come for at least 48 hours, SpaceX said.

The test would have been the first test for SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft together, an endeavor that, if successful, would make it the most powerful rocket in the world and could remake space exploration in coming years.

No one was on board, and SpaceX greeted the decision to postpone the test as an opportunity to learn as much as possible about how the nearly 400-foot-tall rocket operates.

NASA is also paying attention. The space agency intends to use Starship to land astronauts on the surface of the moon as part of its Artemis program and has awarded SpaceX contracts worth about $4 billion.

In both appearance and functionality, SpaceX’s Starship is a sharp contrast to NASA’s tried-and-true approach, designed with reusable components, greater thrust and to accommodate far more people and cargo.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/nasa-sls-spacex-starship-rockets/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9" target=_blank>Read our full visual story</a> to see inside Starship and NASA’s SLS to see the two starkly differing approaches to getting off the Earth.

William Neff

Christian Davenport

SpaceX will not attempt to launch its Starship rocket Monday because of a pressurization issue on the first stage, John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer, said on the broadcast.

Instead, it will continue to fuel the rocket as practice known as a “wet dress rehearsal.” “The good news is everything’s been going good,” Insprucker said. “We’re just working that one issue.”

“A pressurant valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon, no launch today,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted.

On Sunday, Musk said the company would be very careful and would scrub if any problems cropped up.

The company has backup days reserved on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the weather does not look as good then. It also may take a while to refill propellant storage tanks because so much of it was loaded on the vehicle.

Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer, said it would take about 48 hours for the company to be able to try again.

SpaceX hopes the rocket will launch successfully. But the chance of an explosion is real.

The rocket has never flown before, and the company has a history of blowing things up.

The Federal Aviation Administration is the agency charged with protecting the public, and requires space companies to take measures to ensure no one gets hurt in the event of an accident.

Speaking to reporters recently, an FAA official said that safety was its top priority and that it had worked diligently to ensure that people and property on the ground would be protected during the launch attempt.

Launch failures are a “part of our business,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the process. “This is a pretty realistic possibility. We see this quite often with first time launches of new and somewhat unproven space vehicles.”

But the official added that “to date, we’ve had more than 530 FAA licensed activities, none of which have resulted in a fatality injury or significant damage to public property.”

The public is kept miles away from the launch site. Airline traffic is cleared from the skies. And boats are also forced to adhere to a keep-out zone.

If there is a mishap, but no one is injured and no public property is damaged, the FAA would oversee any investigations. If someone is hurt or killed, or if there was significant damage, that would fall to the National Transportation Safety Board, which has sought to have a greater role in rocket mishaps.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/spacex-starship-rocket-tests/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26" target=_blank>Previous Starship tests have ended in flames add link to stamp after it publishes. </a>

SpaceX is “working a pressurization issue,” John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principle integration engineer, said on the SpaceX broadcast. “They’re troubleshooting that right now.”

If they can’t fix the problem, which is on the first stage, they could delay the launch to another day, he said. But loading of propellant continues. There also is a boat in the keep-out safety zone that needs to move before launch, he said.

NASA Water Satellite

On Friday, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenburg Space Force Base in California. The rocket deployed 51 spacecraft, including small satellites, to Earth orbit.

On Sunday, a Dragon spacecraft carrying scientific experiments from the International Space Station returned to Earth, completing its 27th cargo resupply mission. It was carrying studies of plant growth in space, fire safety and changes in muscles and arteries of astronauts while spending time in a microgravity environment.

After it splashed down off the coast of Florida, the experiments were flown by helicopter to the Kennedy Space Center.

Later this week, SpaceX plans to launch another batch of Starlink Internet satellites. And later this month, its Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch a communications satellite.

Last year, SpaceX launched a total of 61 times, a record. This year, it is aiming for about 100 launches.

SpaceX Starship

SpaceX has begun loading the rocket with its propellants, liquid oxygen and liquid methane. A large crowd, reminiscent of the throngs that flock to the Florida Space Coast for launches, has been gathering along the coast of South Padre Island, Tex., since before dawn.

The entire fueling process should take about 1 hour 39 minutes. In all, about 10 million pounds of propellant will be loaded into the rocket.

SpaceX is now tracking for a liftoff at 9:20 a.m. Eastern.

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket

On the eve of SpaceX’s first attempt to launch its Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft, Elon Musk said the company would proceed very cautiously and that a postponement of the launch was highly likely.

“It might launch tomorrow,” he said during a talk on Twitter Spaces. “But we’re going to be very careful, and if we see anything that gives us concern we will postpone the launch.”

If the rocket gets “far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”

With 33 engines igniting, he said he was worried about a cascading effect, where one failure leads to others in succession. “It’s like it’s like having a box of grenades,” he said. “You know, really big grenades.”

Losing “the launchpad is really the thing we’re concerned about,” he said. “It will take us probably several months to rebuild the launchpad if we melt it.”

For years, SpaceX has launched rockets from Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But over a decade ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk started looking for a private spaceport that would allow the company a measure of freedom without the restraints that come with shooting rockets from a government-run facility.

“This is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that is optimized for commercial operations,” Musk said during a groundbreaking ceremony in 2014. “Cape Canaveral and Cape Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites.”

Eventually, SpaceX settled on a spit of land that runs along the Gulf of Mexico near the Mexican border. Initially, it was not ideal for launching rockets.

The biggest problem was the soil density. It was just too soft and porous to withstand the power of the rocket’s thrust. So in about 2015, the company <a href="https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/spacex-construction-causing-problems-for-surrounding-residents/" target="_blank">started hauling in dirt</a> with a constant stream of heavy trucks. The effort took months, and eventually a total of 310,000 cubic yards stood on the site. The giant pile would slowly compress or “surcharge” the soil beneath it, eventually to a density that could serve as a foundation solid enough for rocketry.

SpaceX also had to buy out the residents of the village of Boca Chica, Tex., an area that was made up of about 30 homes.

SpaceX now calls the area Starbase and has erected a sign with the name along a wall shielding its manufacturing site. Located on the side of the road, the wall has become something of a tourist attraction for space fans who come to see the rockets being built and mounted on the launchpads.

Emmy Award, 2021. Peabody Award, 2010. On teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, 2010 and 2011.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (PublicAffairs, April 2018)

As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard

Colby College, B.A., American Studies

Christian Davenport covers NASA and the space industry for The Washington Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos" (PublicAffairs, 2018).

Two Emmys, four National Headliner Awards, member of 2020 Pulitzer, Edward R. Murrow Award winning teams

University of Cincinnati

William Neff creates static and motion graphics and generates original video content for the Washington Post's Local desk. He joined The Post's graphics team after 3 1/2 years on the Video desk, and before that as a senior news artist and multimedia content producer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

SpaceX scrubs Starship test launch after valve freezes

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