(NEW YORK) — At least three people are dead in Oklahoma after a string of tornadoes broke out Wednesday night, officials said.
There have been eight confirmed tornadoes in the state, according to the National Weather Service.
McClain County Emergency Management confirmed that a “large and extremely dangerous tornado” was over Cole, Oklahoma, Wednesday night. The McClain County Sheriff’s Office confirmed at least two deaths and said there were multiple injuries.
Overall, there were at least 15 reported tornadoes across three states: Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa. In addition, huge hail — some the size of a softball — was reported from Illinois to Texas.
Cole was “hit significantly,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Eric Foster said. There are “power lines down everywhere” and major damage to infrastructure, according to Foster, who said hundreds of first responders are on the scene.
On Wednesday night, the McClain County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook that it was responding to “reported injuries & persons entrapped within their shelters,” and that power lines were down and there were outages. McClain County is just south of Oklahoma City.
Due to storm damage, Oklahoma State Highway 74 to State Highway 76 was closed, according to the McClain County Sheriff’s Office.
Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee reported there was significant damage to its campus, but reported there were no injuries. Students living in three on-campus building were relocated on Wednesday night, according to a tweet.
The university also canceled classes on Thursday and Friday.
The cross country storm is moving east and is producing severe weather outbreak with tornadoes, huge hail and extreme straight line winds. On Thursday, severe weather will stretch east from Texas to Illinois, including major cities such as San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis and Little Rock, Arkansas. The biggest threat will be damaging winds and huge hail.
Severe weather will move into the Southeast over the weekend and will stretch from the Carolinas down to Georgia. Cities in the bull’s-eye will be Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina; and near Raleigh, North Carolina. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat Saturday.
The same storm will bring a threat of heavy rain and thunderstorms all the way to Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New York City Saturday evening.
Major flooding ongoing in the upper Mississippi river in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin is expected to get worse this weekend. The river is expected to continue to rise though the end of the week and into the weekend, reaching levels not seen in decades.
(BOWDOIN, Maine) — A 34-year-old man allegedly shot and killed his parents and their two friends at a home in Bowdoin, Maine, days after his release from prison, authorities said.
Around 9:21 a.m. Tuesday, four people were found shot dead at the home: 72-year-old Robert Eger, 62-year-old Patricia Eger and 62-year-old Cynthia Eaton were found inside, while 66-year-old David Eaton was found in the barn, Maine State Police said at a news conference Wednesday.
The Eatons’ son, Joseph Eaton, had been released from the Windham Correctional Facility in Maine on April 14 after serving a sentence for aggravated assault, according to police. His mother picked him up from prison and brought him to Bowdoin to stay with the Egers, who were family friends, police said.
Shortly after the four bodies were found, around 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Joseph Eaton allegedly shot three people as they drove south on Interstate 295 in Yarmouth, about 25 miles south of Bowdoin, police said.
One of the interstate shooting victims, a 25-year-old woman, is in critical condition, police said. The other two victims, a 51-year-old man and his 29-year-old son, suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
Joseph Eaton was taken into custody and “confessed to killing his parents and their friends in Bowdoin,” state police said. Joseph Eaton allegedly “believed that the vehicles he had shot on the interstate were police vehicles that were following him.”
He has been charged with four counts of murder, police said.
Joseph Eaton made his first appearance in court on Thursday morning. He spoke briefly, only to say he understood the charges against him, and did not enter a plea.
ABC News’ Darren Reynolds and Ben Stein contributed to this report.
(BOCA CHICA, Texas) — SpaceX will attempt a second launch of its Starship rocket after the first launch attempt was scrubbed due to a frozen valve in the pressurization system.
The launch will take place at the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas — about 20 miles east of Brownsville — with a 62-minute window opening at 9:28 a.m. ET. A live webcast will begin 45 minutes before liftoff.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Apr 20, 9:46 AM EDT
Starship boosters fail to separate from shuttle, rocket blown up
SpaceX was able to get its Starship rocket off the pad, but all didn’t go as planned.
About three minutes into flight, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX tweeted.
Therefore, SpaceX was forced to abort the mission and blow up the rocket, but the team says it’s more of a “success” than they hoped for.
Apr 20, 9:39 AM EDT
Starship launches into space
Starship launched at 9:33 a.m. ET, just five minutes after the launch window opened, on its inaugural flight.
The shuttle is currently the largest spacecraft in the world at about 393 feet and is expected to eventually carry passengers to the moon and Mars in a similar vein to NASA’s Artemis mission.
Starship is designed to carry up to 100 people on long-duration, interplanetary flights.
Apr 20, 9:23 AM EDT
What Starship’s journey will look like
For this first flight test, SpaceX said Starship will not attempt a vertical landing of Starship or a catch of the booster.
If successful, Starship and its rocket, which is called Super Heavy, will head up to the skies and 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously. About eight minutes after liftoff, Super Heavy will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the spacecraft will travel about 150 miles — partially around the Earth — and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes after liftoff.
There will be a 62-minute window opening at 9:28 a.m. ET. A live webcast began 45 minutes before liftoff.
Apr 20, 8:45 AM EDT
Starship rocket is being loaded
SpaceX is fueling its Starship rocket — the world’s larger spacecraft — as it attempts a second launch.
The first launch attempt was scrubbed Monday due to a frozen valve in the pressurization system.
“The Starship team is go for prop load; team is keeping an eye on the weather,” SpaceX said in a tweet.
(WASHINGTON) — A supervisor at the IRS has told lawmakers that he has information that suggests the Biden administration could be mishandling the investigation into President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
In a letter to lawmakers obtained by ABC News, the lawyer for the IRS whistleblower says his client is an IRS criminal supervisory special agent “who has been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
The letter does not name Hunter Biden specifically, but lawmakers have been made aware he is the “high profile, controversial” subject that the lawyer is referring to. In addition, while the letter refers to preferential treatment that Hunter Biden has allegedly received, there are no specific examples provided to support the accusations.
The letter says that “The protected disclosures: (1) contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee, (2) involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case, and (3) detail examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
The lawyer for the whistleblower didn’t immediately respond to ABC’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the letter.
“It’s deeply concerning that the Biden Administration may be obstructing justice by blocking efforts to charge Hunter Biden for tax violations,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), said in a statement.
“The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has been following the Bidens’ tangled web of complex corporate and financial records,” said Comer, who was one of the recipients of the letter. “We’ve been wondering all along where the heck the DOJ and the IRS have been. Now it appears the Biden Administration may have been working overtime to prevent the Bidens from facing any consequences.”
White House officials are not commenting on the whistleblower claims, and instead referred questions to the Justice Department and IRS.
Federal authorities with the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump-era appointee, have been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018, ABC News has previously reported.
(NEW YORK) — Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced plans this week to create an AI-driven conversation tool called “TruthGPT,” after criticizing the popular AI text bot ChatGPT for being “politically correct.”
“There’s certainly a path to AI dystopia, which is to train AI to be deceptive,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of Twitter, cautioned in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday.
AI chatbots pose significant risks centered on political bias, since the models can generate vast amounts of speech, potentially shaping public opinion and enabling the spread of misinformation, experts told ABC News.
However, the comments from Musk underscore the fraught challenge raised by the issue, because content moderation itself has become a polarizing topic and Musk has voiced opinions that place his approach within that hot-button political context, some experts added.
“Musk is correct that if we can’t solve the truthfulness problem and the reliability problem, that poses a risk for AI safety,” Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, who specializes in AI, told ABC News.
“But tying that question to political correctness might actually be a mistake,” he added. “You have to separate the truth from the politics if you want to be credible on the truth issue. It’s a mistake to try to tie the two together.”
Created by artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot — a computer program that converses with human users.
Neither Musk nor OpenAI responded to a request for comment from ABC News.
ChatGPT uses an algorithm that selects words based on lessons learned from scanning billions of pieces of text across the internet. The tool has gained popularity for viral posts that demonstrate it composing Shakespearean poetry or identifying bugs in computer code.
But the technology has also stoked controversy with some troubling results. The designers of ChatGPT programmed safeguards that prevent it from taking up controversial opinions or expressing hate speech.
Content moderation on AI poses legitimate challenges for designers, who must determine which messages are sufficiently offensive or odious to warrant intervention, experts told ABC News.
“If a product is being used by millions of people, safeguards are something the designers have to put in place,” Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, told ABC News.
“The question is: How do you make it fair or neutral? That’s a little bit of a judgment of the designers,” he added. “You could imagine a GPT that’s politically biased.”
Further, the responses from AI conversation tools depend heavily on the text with which the model is trained, Kathleen Carley, another professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
“There’s this view that the majority of information that it was trained on is more left-leaning and has certain political biases and certain political agendas built into it,” Carley said. “That’s where that argument is coming from.”
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left the organization in 2018, in a December tweet accused OpenAI of “training AI to be woke.”
While AI chatbots deserve scrutiny over political bias, Musk stands as an imperfect spokesperson for such criticism because of his own high-profile political views, some experts said.
Musk has taken up a slew of conservative stances in recent months, including an expression of support for Republican candidates in the midterm elections last year and repeated criticism of “woke” politics.
“I think what he means by ‘truth’ is ‘agrees with me,'” Oren Etzioni, CEO of Allen Institute for AI and a computer science professor at the University of Washington, told ABC News.
Still, the polarized political environment poses a challenge for any AI chatbot developer attempting to moderate responses, experts said.
“Politics as it exists today doesn’t draw lines that finely,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told ABC News. “You would have to know where to draw the line in a sensible place to get AI to draw the line in a sensible place.”
(NEW YORK) — Earlier this week, a federal judge in Colorado temporarily exempted a Catholic healthcare clinic from having to follow the state’s recent ban on abortion pill “reversal” treatment.
Gov. Jared Polis signed the ban as part of a series of bills Friday, becoming the first state in the U.S. to ban use of the treatment and furthering enshrining abortion access in Colorado.
However, Bella Health + Wellness, an anti-abortion clinic, sued, arguing the ban violates its constitutional rights, including the right to free speech and equal protection under the law.
Judge Daniel Domenico, a Trump appointee, agreed and issued the temporary halt as the litigation unfolds in court.
Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this past summer, some states had enacted laws requiring doctors to inform patients that medical abortions could be reversed.
Experts say this so-called “reversal” is unfounded and could be potentially dangerous.
“It’s not just that [patients are] being sold snake oil, that somebody is giving them something in bad faith in an effort to somehow persuade them that they can save their pregnancy,” Dr. Spencer McClelland, an OBGYN at Denver Health, told ABC News. “It’s actually that the best data we have has raised enough concerns about it.”
How does medication abortion work?
To induce an abortion, or manage an early miscarriage, a combination of two pills — mifepristone and misoprostol — is used.
Mifepristone works by blocking progesterone, a hormone that the body needs to continue a pregnancy.
This causes the uterine lining to stop thickening and to break down, detaching the embryo. The second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes the uterus to contract and dilates the cervix, which will expel the embryo.
The Food and Drug Administration authorized mifepristone for medication abortion in September 2000 for up to seven weeks’ gestation, which was then extended to 10 weeks’ gestation in 2016.
However, the World Health Organization says the two drug-regimen can be taken up until the 12-week mark of pregnancy.
Medication abortions currently make up more than half of all abortions performed in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
McClelland says evidence shows that medication abortions are safe and effective.
“The two being used together makes the process over 95% effective in terms of just completing the abortion process and more importantly, has a really, really, really, really, really, really, really low complication rate,” he said.
What is abortion ‘reversal’?
So-called abortion pill “reversal” is heralded by anti-abortion groups as a tool for pregnant women who regret deciding to end their pregnancy.
The process involves giving the hormone progesterone — orally, vaginally or by injection — after it was blocked by mifepristone in an attempt to “outcompete” the effects of the pill.
Medical groups, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and Planned Parenthood, do not support the regimen.
Why is it considered unsafe?
The ACOG has spoken against so-called “reversal,” calling the treatment “not backed by science” as well as “unproven and unethical.”
“As opposed to mifepristone, which has an amazing amount of studies about its usage, showing its safety and efficacy, the high-dose progesterone for the purpose of abortion reversal has a real paucity of evidence,” McClelland said.
The ACOG referenced a 2012 case study that proponents of abortion pill reversal have used, in which six women took mifepristone to end their pregnancies and then took varying doses of an injection of progesterone.
Of those women, four continued their pregnancies.
However, the ACOG says this is not evidence that giving progesterone allowed the pregnancies to continue because it is well-documented that mifepristone is effective with misoprostol, not on its own.
McClelland said this type a case study is different from a randomized controlled trial, in which something — in this case, a medication — is compared against a placebo to show that what scientists are seeing is in fact a result of this medication.
“The abortion reversal pill has a lot of case theories or case reports, and those are essentially just some groups of people publishing reports about what happened to their patients when they took this without being able to say that the reason that pregnancies continued at a certain rate was actually because of this medication,” he said. “Because if you compare them to people who didn’t take it, maybe you’d find out those pregnancies continued at the same rate. And it’s just a weaker study design.”
Another study, in 2019, examining medication abortion reversal was ended early due to safety concerns.
“A really surprising number of women experienced threatening hemorrhage and having to come to the hospital for emergency care after they were enrolled in this,” McClelland said. “What we can say for sure is they terminated the study early because they didn’t feel comfortable continuing the study.”
ACOG has also argued laws that require physicians to tell patients that medication abortion can be reversed “represent dangerous political interference and compromise patient care and safety.”
McClelland said these kinds of laws, which include a pregnant person being required to look at an ultrasound before they have an abortion, often have a façade as being in a patient’s best interest when it can be just the opposite.
“It’s definitely coercive or it implies some lack of support or lack of expertise in the person who’s counseling them about their abortion,” he said. “There are many, many techniques in this effort to reduce the number of people having abortions.”
With mifepristone potentially set to be restricted by the Supreme Court after a ruling from a federal judge in Texas reversed the FDA’s approval of the pill — although it has been temporarily stayed — McClelland says it’s important for experts to do what they can to combat medical misinformation.
Opponents to mifepristone have argued that the FDA did not do enough due diligence before approving the medication, but McClelland says its abortion “reversal” treatment that is unproven.
“What is triggering for the medical community is yet another moment where medical expertise is devalued and reproductive rights are devalued, and we honestly feel like we’re screaming into the wind to convince people that we know what we’re doing and can be trusted,” he said. “When that particularly involves infringing on the rights of people and we can’t seem to do our best to advocate based on the evidence we have, and that’s paralyzing.”
(NEW YORK) — A dry winter, following an even drier summer, has left much of Europe fearing another extended drought. Striking satellite images show just how much lakes in Spain and France have shrunk, pushing local authorities to act.
The Sau reservoir, north of Barcelona in Spain’s Catalonia region, was created in 1962, flooding an existing village in the basin to make way for it. Over the years, the steeple of the church has sometimes been visible when the water reached low levels. But now, after multiple dry years, entire segments of the town have become accessible again.
In fact, the water has reached such low levels that last month Catalan authorities announced they would begin the process of draining the reservoir completely. At this point, the reservoir was about 10% full, with a capacity to supply water to about one million people for three months, well below the over five million people who typically rely on it.
As part of this operation to drain the reservoir, authorities are also working to remove several tonnes of fish from the water to prevent them from dying in large quantities and contaminating the water. In a statement, the regional authorities described the draining of the Sau reservoir as “an extraordinary measure … to guarantee the population’s demands as much as possible.”
The Sau reservoir is only one of multiple bodies of water that have lost drastic amounts of water over successive dry seasons. The Lac de Montbel, in southern France, is below 30% of its capacity. The lake started receding in the summer of 2022 and the region’s driest winter in decades has only compounded the situation.
At the end of February, the area surrounding the lake came under “reinforced alert” for water restriction, meaning water use for agricultural purposes must be cut by half. Individuals are also urged to reduce their water consumption as much as possible.
Andreas Gunther is project coordinator for the Global Gravity Based Groundwater Project, or G3P. It’s an initiative using satellites to try to map Europe’s groundwater capacity, to gather a picture of how much water is available on the continent, both in lakes and rivers, but also in aquifers deep below the surface.
Gunther said the current problems go back to 2018 when successive dry years strained Europe’s water supply. A few rainy years gave hope that a drought might be avoided but the rain still fell short of expectations.
“This was not sufficient to restore the deficits that had been generated in the two to five years before,” he said.
The situation now is at its most dire in the 20 years since mapping began, Gunther said.
“Many areas reached their lowest ever level in water storage in the summer of 2022,” he noted.
Gunther’s groundwater project aims to help governments and organizations plan as these dry cycles are exacerbated by climate change. With the last eight years in Europe being the warmest ever recorded, observation and policy will be key to managing the future of water on the continent.
(WASHINGTON) — Opposition to Julie Su as President Joe Biden’s next labor secretary, and the reluctance of some Democrats to back her, has put her nomination in doubt as she faces a confirmation hearing Thursday.
Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana are Democratic holdouts and their opposition could derail Su’s confirmation vote in the 51-49 Senate.
Her nomination is further put in question by the absence of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is sidelined recovering from shingles and unable to vote.
Time is dwindling for the Biden administration and Senate Democratic leaders to persuade Manchin and Tester — along with independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — to consider approving Su, formerly California’s top labor official, as Biden’s choice to replace Marty Walsh.
Walsh left the administration in March in order to head up the National Hockey League Players Association.
Su will appear before the Senate HELP committee on Thursday, facing what is likely to be a turbulent confirmation process.
The Los Angeles native was narrowly confirmed on a party-line vote in 2021 to become Walsh’s deputy secretary of labor. Tester, Manchin and Sinema, who voted to confirm Su at that time, all now face competitive reelection races in 2024 and appear to be distancing themselves from Biden.
“My vote for her last time was all predicated on Marty,” Manchin told Politico last month.
Republican critics oppose Su’s labor policy record in California and her oversight of the disbursement of unemployment benefits across the state during the pandemic — a process they say was marked by fraud.
But Su, a first-generation Chinese American who would be the only Asian American member of Biden’s Cabinet if confirmed, has robust support from most Asian American organizations, immigrant rights advocates and women’s groups.
She also has backing from much of organized labor, which has said “well-heeled lobbyists and corporate special interests are spending big to block her confirmation.”
“What stands out about Su, beyond her expertise in labor law and policy, is that she believes so deeply in what she does,” the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said in a statement.
“Prior to her predecessor, it had been decades before workers even had a union member at the helm of the Labor Department,” the union added.
Of the 606 nominees Biden has picked for his administration, 511 have been confirmed so far, with 93 nominations pending in the Senate, according to the Washington Post’s appointee tracker.
But Su is hardly the first nomination snarl the Biden administration has had in recent months.
Several important judicial nominations have been delayed due to Feinstein’s absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Some Democrats have have called on her to resign while Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer and Judiciary chairman Dick Durbin have attempted to replace her on the committee — a move Senate Republicans have blocked.
Phil Washington withdrew his name as Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration after he was unable to shore up Democratic support. Sinema and Tester had expressed reservations.
Also last month, Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn withdrew after Manchin announced he would vote against her.
(NEW YORK) — A day after Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, a Fox spokesperson said Wednesday that the network will be “ready to defend” itself against a similar suit from a second voting machine company.
The statement came after the company, Smartmatic, issued a statement Tuesday reaffirming its commitment to its own lawsuit in the wake of the historic Dominion settlement, saying that “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest.”
“Smartmatic remains committed to clearing its name, recouping the significant damage done to the company in more than 50 countries, and holding Fox accountable for undermining democracy,” the statement from Smartmatic’s attorney, J. Erik Connolly, said.
Fox responded in a statement Wednesday, saying, “We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025. As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”
Smartmatic, based in Florida, is suing Fox News, Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, former Fox host Lou Dobbs, and former President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani for $2.7 billion. The suit was filed in February 2021.
At least seven defamation lawsuits involving Fox News or Dominion Voting Systems remain related to claims that were broadcast surrounding the 2020 election. Dominion is still pursuing six other defamation lawsuits against a host of other individuals it said also pushed false claims, including right-wing network Newsmax, and former Trump attorneys Giuliani and Sidney Powell, among others.
“We’ve got some other people who have some accountability coming towards them,” Stephen Shakelford, Dominion’s attorney, said following the Fox News settlement Tuesday. “We’re not done yet.”
Dominion had accused the conservative network of knowingly pushing false conspiracy theories that Dominion had rigged the 2020 presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor, in what Dominion claims was an effort to combat concerns over declining ratings and viewer retention.
In response to Dominion’s claims, Fox said it was simply reporting on newsworthy claims made by then-President Trump and his allies — a sentiment they repeated in their statement regarding the Smartmatic suit on Wednesday.
But Judge Eric Davis, who oversaw the Dominion case, essentially blocked that defense, writing in a pre-trial ruling that it “fails to shield” Fox from liability and that the court “will not apply the privilege here.”
“Just because something is newsworthy doesn’t mean you can defame somebody,” Davis said in court during a hearing in the Dominion case.
In a filing in the case earlier this week, Fox News wrote that it “denies the allegation of a disinformation campaign.”
(BOCA CHICA, Texas) — SpaceX will attempt a second launch of its Starship rocket after the first launch attempt was scrubbed due to a frozen valve in the pressurization system.
The launch will take place at the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas — about 20 miles east of Brownsville — with a 62-minute window opening at 9:28 a.m. ET. A live webcast will begin 45 minutes before liftoff.
It comes after CEO Elon Musk warned subscribers during a Twitter “Spaces” event for Sunday evening, to set expectations “low” and that the launch might be postponed.
Starship is currently the largest spacecraft in the world at about 393 feet, which is expected to eventually carry passengers to the moon and Mars in a similar vein to NASA’s Artemis mission.
“Starhsip is a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and travel to Mars and beyond,” SpaceX said in a press release. “With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship.”
For this first flight test, SpaceX said it will not attempt a vertical landing of Starship or a catch of the booster.
If successful, Starship and its rocket, which is called Super Heavy, will head up to the skies and 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously. About eight minutes after liftoff, Super Heavy will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the spacecraft will travel about 150 miles — partially around the Earth — and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes after liftoff.
After the valve issue was discovered Monday, SpaceX said the attempted launch would be turned into a wet dress rehearsal, meaning it simulates every stage of rocket launch, but without liftoff actually occurring.
Problems are not uncommon while preparing for a launch attempt. Last year, NASA had multiple failed attempts to get Artemis I off the ground before the successful launch on Nov. 16.
Faulty temperature sensors, liquid hydrogen leaks and the landfall of Hurricane Ian contributed to delays. However, the spacecraft finally managed to spend 25.5 days in space and journeyed on a 1.4-million-mile journey around the Moon before splashing down on Dec. 11.
Starship is eventually designed to carry up to 100 people on long-duration, interplanetary flights. Meanwhile, NASA recently announced the four astronauts who are planned to take their first steps on the moon by 2025.
