SpaceX aims to overcome Starship setbacks with tenth flight test

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WASHINGTON - Elon Musks SpaceX will try to launch its giant Starship rocket for a tenth time from Texas on Monday to overcome a streak of development setbacks and achieve several long-sought milestones essential to the Mars rocket systems reusable design.

The 232-foot (71-meter) tall Super Heavy booster and its 171-foot tall Starship upper half - together taller than New Yorks Statue of Liberty - sat stacked on a launch mount at SpaceXs Starbase rocket facilities ahead of a 7:30 p.m. ET liftoff time.

A liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad nixed a Sunday launch attempt, billionaire Musk wrote on X overnight, adding SpaceX would try again on Monday. It was unclear whether Musk intended to give a pre-launch Starship talk that had been planned but cancelled on Sunday.

Development of SpaceXs next-generation rocket, key to the companys powerful launch business and Musks goal to send humans to Mars, has faced repeated hiccups this year.

NASA hopes to use the rocket as soon as 2027 for its first crewed moon landing since the Apollo program. SpaceXs Starlink satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue, is also tied to Starships success. Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceXs workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, into space.

In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours, Musk said on Sunday, replying to a user on X.

This year, two Starship testing failures early in flight, another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a massive test stand explosion in June that sent debris flying