SpaceX delays Starship Launch Due to unfavorable weather

Loren Grush, Bloomberg News on Aug 25, 2025

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SpaceX again delayed a critical test of its massive Starship rocket a few minutes before liftoff on Monday, citing unfavorable weather conditions.

Starship was slated to take off on its 10th major mission from SpaceX’s South Texas launch facility, called Starbase. The mission had heightened stakes following a series of explosive setbacks this year for Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s reusable rocket.

A launch commentator said the company could try again Tuesday.

A separate technical delay — a liquid oxygen leak in the rocket’s ground systems — halted the launch on Sunday.

“There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain for both the ship and the booster,” Musk told viewers before the launch was delayed.

SpaceX has been flying Starship on a series of test missions designed to ready the vehicle for lofting satellites — and eventually people — to Earth’s orbit and beyond.

But the company has had a rough year of development, with its first two flights of 2025 blowing up within minutes, and a third failing to deploy dummy satellites and spinning out of control. Another Starship spacecraft exploded on a test stand in June during fueling.

Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill Musk’s aims. SpaceX has opted to temporarily reassign roughly 20% of its Falcon engineering team to Starship to help with testing and reliability, Bloomberg previously reported.

The company says it uses failures as learning opportunities that it can apply to future launches. But after a lackluster start to the year, the upcoming mission faces extra pressure to perform better than the others.