With Starship, SpaceX encounters an obstacle that haunted NASA’s space shuttles

A closer look at the top of SpaceX's Starship rocket, tail number Ship 37, showing some of the different configurations of heat shield tiles SpaceX wants to test on this flight. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

STARBASE, Texas—For the third day in a row, SpaceX engineers prepared to send the company's massive Starship rocket into space Tuesday after a technical problem and bad weather grounded the test flight on two previous launch attempts.

The one-hour launch window opens at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC) at SpaceX's sprawling rocket development site in South Texas, just a couple of miles north of the mouth of the Rio Grande River at the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX called off a launch attempt Sunday after detecting a leak in the plumbing that flows super-cold liquid oxygen propellant into the rocket. Technicians fixed the problem in time ...