With less than an hour to go before launch, SpaceX scrubbed the 10th launch of the Starship — the largest rocket ever to fly — on Sunday.
The scrub came as a big disappointment for the many people watching in person close to the launch site at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, as well as for those watching online. The company said it needed time “to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” and has yet to announce a new launch schedule for the 121-meter-tall rocket.
Still, much earlier in the day, at 2:45 a.m. ET, SpaceX managed to launch its 33rd commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission used SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon spacecraft carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies for the orbital outpost. Generating just 1.7 million pounds of thrust at launch — compared to the 17 million produced by the mighty Starship — the Falcon 9 may lack the spectacle of SpaceX’s next-gen rocket, but it has a level of reliability that Starship engineers are keen to match.
You can watch the Falcon 9 lift off in the video clip below:
Around eight minutes after launch, the first-stage booster returned to a droneship waiting in the ocean just off the coast of Florida. Here’s some footage showing the booster touching down.
The perfect landing means the booster can now be refurbished and used for another flight.
Sunday’s mission marked the seventh flight of this particular booster, having previously launched O3b mPOWER-E, Crew-10, Bandwagon-3, O3b mPOWER-D, and two Starlink missions.
The Dragon will take about 28 hours to reach the space station, where it’s expected to dock on Monday at around 7:30 a.m. ET. Besides delivering food and science experiments for the crew, the capsule will also perform a reboost operation to demonstrate its ability to help sustain the station’s altitude, which slips over time.
The Dragon will remain docked at the ISS for about four months, after which it’ll return to Earth with research equipment and cargo, splashing down off the coast of California.
