Free Republic

WASHINGTON — SpaceX aborted the launch of its latest Starship test flight July 16 when some of the vehicle’s engines failed to ignite. Starship was scheduled to lift off on the Flight 13 mission from the company’s Starbase, Texas, test site at 6:45 p.m. Eastern. However, the launch was aborted just as Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster ignited. SpaceX said moments later that it was calling off the launch attempt for the day. “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk posted on social media about 10 minutes after the...

NASA plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program. At a March 21 meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, revealed that NASA and the European Space Agency had agreed to revise the schedule and design for upcoming missions that will return samples being cached by the Perseverance rover to Earth. Original plans called for the launch of both a NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and ESA-led Earth Return Orbiter in 2026....