SpaceX scrubs 8th test flight of heavy-lift rocket Starship from Texas base

March 3 (UPI) -- SpaceX on Monday scrubbed the eighth test flight of its biggest and most powerful rocket.

After a short hold with 40 seconds to planned liftoff, the Starship mission was delayed. Fuel on the booster and spacecraft was then offloaded.

"Standing down from today's flight test attempt," SpaceX posted on X. "Starship team is determining the next best available opportunity to fly

Weather conditions are more favorable for Tuesday.

The liftoff of Falcon 9 was scheduled to take place during a 60-minute window opening at about 5:30 p.m. CT in south Texas at SpaceX's Starbase site in Boca Chica near Brownsville. The flight was scrapped around 5:55 p.m.

The live-streamed coverage began roughly 40 minutes before liftoff.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has been developing Starship in its effort to ultimately help settle the moon and, ideally, Mars. This Super Heavy is Booster 15.

Its last launch on Jan. 16 failed right after liftoff when the upper stage of SpaceX's uncrewed Starship rocket exploded minutes after liftoff, leading the aerospace company to declare the vessel a "loss." It was the seventh test flight of the heavy-lift spacecraft.

"The most probable root cause for the loss of ship was identified as a harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system," according to a report on the investigation into the explosion.

"The subsequent propellant leaks exceeded the venting capability of the ship's attic area and resulted in sustained fires," it added.

The new flight was to deploy four dummy satellites similar to its next-generation Starlink broadband satellite models as a first test of a satellite deploy mission.

SpaceX officials say the Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and "are expected to demise upon entry" about 66 minutes after launch somewhere near the Indian Ocean off western Australia.

The Super Heavy booster, which is 232 feet tall, is the heaviest flying object ever built by humankind at a weight of approximately 12 million pounds at liftoff. Overall, the Starship is 394 feet compared with the Saturn V rocket, which was 363 feet tall and 6.2 million pounds, which made trips to the moon.

SpaceX's Starship is scheduled to go to the moon as part of NASA's Artemis program with a landing no earlier than mid-2027 with humans, the first time since 1972. And a trip to Mars is on the drawing board.