SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy booster test fired 14 engines
SpaceX has just conducted its most ambitious and powerful test yet with its Starship Mars rocket.
SpaceX fired 14 Raptor engines on Booster 7, prototype of starshipthe first stage of a Super Heavy rocket during a “static fire” test today (Nov. 14) at Starbase, the company’s facility in South Texas.
“Full duration test on 14 engines,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted (opens in new tab) shortly after the static fire, which occurred at 1:51 PM EST (1851 GMT) and lasted about 10 seconds. The test was videotaped by observers such as NASAS Space Flight (opens in new tab) and Boca Chica Rocket Ranch (opens in new tab).
Connected: SpaceX fires up the Starship Super Heavy booster again in a long engine test
Static fires are common pre-flight tests in which the rocket engines are ignited briefly while the vehicle remains anchored to the ground.
And SpaceX is preparing to fly Starship, the program’s first orbital test mission, which will apparently include Booster 7 and an upper-stage prototype known as Ship 24. That landmark flight could launch before the end of the year. musk said.
Today’s static fire could be a big step toward orbital liftoff: It doubled the previous highest number of Raptor engines that SpaceX has fired during a Starship engine test. But there’s still a lot of work to do to demonstrate Booster 7’s flight readiness; the vehicle boasts a total of 33 Raptors.
Ship 24 has six Raptor engines. SpaceX ignited them all simultaneously during a Static fire on September 8th.
SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to the moon and Marsas well as perform various other spaceflight tasks.
So far, starship prototypes have made several test flights, but none have soared above about 6 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky. And none of them involved a super heavy vehicle.
SpaceX has already signed up a number of customers for Starship, including NASA, which selected the vehicle as the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of lunar exploration. If all goes according to plan, astronauts will land on the lunar surface in 2025 or 2026 aboard Starship from the Artemis 3 mission.
Private customers have also signed up to drive the Starship on missions around the Moon (not to its surface). Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa book an entire flightfor example, and space tourism pioneer Denis Tito and his wife Akiko two seats purchased on a different mission.
Mike Wall is the author of “There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
#SpaceXs #Starship #Super #Heavy #booster #test #fired #engines
