SpaceX looks to launch Starship on Tuesday night after two days of scrubs

SpaceX has lined up its massive Starship and Super Heavy rocket for what would be its 10th suborbital test flight, aiming to complete goals that have fallen short so far in 2025.

Monday weather, though, forced another scrub one day after ground systems stymied chances for liftoff from SpaceX’s Texas launch site Starbase. It had been aiming for a 7:59 p.m. liftoff amid a one-hour launch window, but anvil clouds in the area forced a hold with T-40 seconds on the clock and teams ultimately called off the attempt for the day.

A new launch attempt is set for Tuesday during a one-hour window that opens at 7:30 p.m. EDT.

This would be Starship’s fourth launch in 2025.

The first two launch attempts this year had explosive ends to its upper stage that painted the skies with destructive debris seen from Florida, the Bahamas and the Caribbean. A third launch had the upper stage lost over the Indian Ocean.

The booster, at least, has seen some success this year, including the second ever catch at the launch site, and then a reflight of that booster.

There will be no attempt to catch the booster back for the 10th flight, though. Instead, SpaceX will try for a controlled landing over the Gulf waters, testing out some extreme emergency landing profiles, while the upper stage will try again to complete tasks attempted without success on the three previous launches.

That includes the first payload deployment by sending out a side hatch eight mass simulators that mirror the size of the company’s Starlink satellites.

The flight path aims once again to send the upper stage more than halfway around the Earth with a landing in the Indian Ocean off the western coast of Australia.

The flight also looks to relight one of the upper stage’s six Raptor engines during its suborbital flight.

“The flight test includes several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site,” reads a post on the SpaceX website. “A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry.”

That includes multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling in the company’s effort to try out alternative materials for heat protection during reentry.

Despite some explosive endings this year, the company could still see some sort of demise.

“Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure,” the company stated. “Flight tests continue to provide valuable learnings to inform the design of the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles.”

While all test flights so far have been from Texas, SpaceX is pursuing two Starship launch sites on the Space Coast.

At more than 400 feet tall and with the booster producing more than 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket that has made it to space, although it has yet to perform an orbital launch.

A tower is already under construction at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A, adjacent to where it currently flies Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX has also been leading the removal of United Launch Alliance’s launch site infrastructure from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37, which ULA vacated after the final Delta IV Heavy launch in 2024. It aims to build a Starship launch site there while keeping its Canaveral site for Falcon 9 launches at Space Launch Complex 40.

SpaceX is awaiting the completion of a pair of environmental impact statements before it can move forward with its Florida plans. In the meantime, work continues at KSC on a new manufacturing site to fabricate the Starship upper stages and Super Heavy boosters, part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure improvement project.

Texas will continue to be the testbed launch site, but SpaceX plans for operational Starship flights from the two Space Coast sites, with as many as 120 launches per year.

2025 Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.