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Launch pad leak moved Sunday launch attempt to Monday

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Three Starship failures in 2025 raise stakes for rocket's

latest

test

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SpaceX seeks progress in ship's heat shield, steering

flaps

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's 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 system's reusable design.

The 232-foot (71-meter) tall Super Heavy booster and its

171-foot tall Starship upper half - together taller than New

York's Statue of Liberty - sat stacked on a launch mount at

SpaceX's 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 SpaceX's next-generation rocket, key to the

company's powerful launch business and Musk's 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. SpaceX's Starlink

satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue,

is also tied to Starship's success. Musk aims to use Starship to

launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far

been deployed by SpaceX's 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 into nearby

Mexican territory have tested SpaceX's capital-intensive

test-to-failure development approach, in which new iterations of

rocket prototypes are flown to their technical limits.

That ethos is markedly different from SpaceX's rivals such as

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket made an

operational debut in January following years of on-the-ground

development and testing. The new Vulcan rocket from United

Launch Alliance, co-owned by Boeing ( BA ) and Lockheed Martin ( LMT )

, had a similar upbringing before its 2024 debut.

With SpaceX's approach, testing failures early in Starship's

flight prevent the company from gathering vital technical data

needed to advance the rocket's design.

Still, SpaceX, which Musk expects to record around $15.5

billion in revenue this year, has continued to swiftly produce

new Starships for test flights at Starbase, a sprawling and

rapidly growing rocket industrial complex. The area was made a

municipality in May by local voters, many of them SpaceX

workers.

Starship's setbacks underscore the technical complexities of the

latest iteration. The ship is packed with far more capabilities

than predecessor models such as increased thrust, a potentially

more resilient heat shield and stronger steering flaps crucial

to nailing its atmospheric reentry - key traits of its rapidly

reusable design that Musk has long pushed for.

SpaceX has a lengthy to-do list for Starship's development

before the rocket begins routine missions envisioned by Musk.

That includes demonstrating safe returns from space, payload

deployments in orbit and complex in-space propellant refuelings

crucial to its moon mission assignments from NASA.

On Monday, the rocket system will launch from Texas and separate

in half dozens of miles in altitude, with its Super Heavy

booster returning for a water landing off the Texas coast while

Starship ignites its own engines to blast further into space.

In space, Starship will attempt to deploy mock Starlink

satellites and reignite an engine along its suborbital path

around the globe. Atmospheric reentry over the Indian Ocean will

test its exterior steering flaps and an array of experimental

heat shield tiles as the ship blazes through intense friction

and heat.