SpaceX’s Starship Flight 8, scheduled for March 3, 2025, from Starbase in Texas, was scrubbed late in the countdown due to Super Heavy booster issues. During propellant loading, problems emerged, leading to a hold at T-40 seconds. Despite a brief fix, an automatic reset triggered an abort. Elon Musk noted on X, “we were 20 bar low on ground spin start pressure,” highlighting a pressure deficiency. SpaceX rescheduled the launch for March 6, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. EST (23:30 UTC).
Flight 7, launched January 16, 2025, marked the first Block 2 ship (Ship 33) with Booster 14. The booster was successfully caught by the tower’s “chopstick” arms, but 8.5 minutes after liftoff, a propellant leak in the upper stage’s “attic” area caused a fire. A “harmonic response” in the propulsion system stressed propellant lines, leading to the ship’s breakup over the Atlantic near the Turks and Caicos Islands. The Autonomous Flight Safety System destroyed the vehicle to prevent uncontrolled debris fall. Weather delays had pushed the launch from January 10 to January 13, January 15, and finally January 16 due to rain and fog.
Flight 7 carried ten mock Starlink satellite simulators for Starship’s first payload deployment test, loaded via a “Pez” dispenser system. The propellant leak and fire prevented their release, with the ship disintegrating before its planned Indian Ocean splashdown.
Flight 8, with four simulators, aims to test this deployment system on a suborbital trajectory, with debris landing in the Indian Ocean. Additional goals include a Raptor engine restart in space, evaluating the upgraded heat shield, reentry experiments for future upper-stage catches, and a third booster catch.
Upgrades since Flight 7 feature redesigned nose fins to reduce reentry heating, a 25% propellant capacity increase, enhanced avionics, a nitrogen purge system, and extra vents to address Flight 7’s anomaly.
Musk called Flight 7’s loss “barely a bump in the road,” projecting up to 25 launches in 2025. Flight 8’s mission overview targets unmet Flight 7 objectives, emphasizing payload deployment. These tests refine Starship for lunar and Martian missions, reflecting SpaceX’s iterative approach.
In 2024, SpaceX performed 134 of 259 global launches (51.7%), but its share of payload mass is estimated at 90%. China contributes about 5% of the mass, with the rest of the world making up the remaining 5%. This reflects SpaceX’s outsized role in delivering payloads to space, driven by its frequent and high-capacity launches.
Watch the livestream of the SpaceX Starship 8 launch here:
Watch Starship’s eighth flight test → https://t.co/alyJTRtgTh https://t.co/7xtpEucyQB
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 6, 2025
