The excitement around Starship’s 8th flight test (IFT-8) continued until the SpaceX crew announced live that today’s launch test had been scrubbed (aborted).
This was an unexpected outcome as the flight countdown went until T-40 seconds. This is a critical moment for SpaceX engineers to finally decide if the launch is a go or abort (scrub).
At once, SpaceX official live-stream hosts said that the flight was a go. But the flight counter was reset to T-40 seconds within a few seconds.
Both Flight 8 Booster 15 (1st stage) and Ship 33 (upper/2nd stage) vehicles were having issues at this critical moment. Automated systems blocked liftoff at the final moments as the booster was having further technical problems.
The official announcement by SpaceX confirmed that today’s Starship Flight 8 is a scrub. The statement on X read:
Standing down from today’s flight test attempt. Starship team is determining the next best available opportunity to fly.
Within an hour of the Flight 8 scrub, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave an update on his social media platform X.
“Too many question marks about this flight and then we were 20 bar low on ground spin start pressure,” Musk said.
Elon Musk also confirmed that another attempt at launching Flight 8 Starship will be made in the next couple of days. However, the fully integrated Starship will be destacked (upper stage Ship 33 will be unmounted from Booster 15 for inspection).
“Best to destack, inspect both stages and try again in a day or two,” he further notified the public through X (Twitter).
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- SpaceX prepares for Flight 12 Starship prelaunch testing, the first V3 Starship 39 (Starbase updates)
- Starship Booster 19 survives the cryo test, Flight 12 updates from Starbase
