SpaceX on Thursday aborted the launch of its Starship rocket from the company's Starbase, Texas, site due to engine problems.

"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X.

"Now offloading propellant. Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days."

The company had planned its 13th flight test for 6:45 p.m. ET but aborted the launch after the engines failed to fully ignite less than a second before liftoff.

"We did trigger a hold on the booster that aborted our liftoff as we ​were starting to light those Raptor engines," said ⁠SpaceX spokesperson Dan ⁠Huot, speaking on the ​company's livestream.

"We'll take some ​time, dig into what triggered ‌that abort once the booster was igniting to launch, and then we'll figure ⁠out what our path forward is going to be."

The scrubbed test flight follows a record-setting June initial public offering of the company. SpaceX shares fell following the news, plunging below the $135 offering price for the first time this week.

NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in the next few years. The space agency has hired SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to build and fly the lunar landers that are intended to return humanity to the surface of the moon after an absence of more than half a century.

Both companies need to have their landers — Starship and Blue Moon — ready to fly by next year so that the newly named Artemis III crew can practice docking their capsule with them in orbit around Earth.

The mission after that — Artemis IV planned for no earlier than 2028 — would use one of those landers to take two astronauts to the moon's south polar region.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.