SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy booster tests 14 engines
SpaceX has just completed its most ambitious and powerful test yet with its Starship Mars rocket.
SpaceX ignited 14 Raptor engines on Booster 7, a prototype of spaceship‘s first-stage Super Heavy rocket, during a “static fire” test today (Nov. 14) at Starbase, the company’s South Texas facility.
“Full test duration of 14 engines”, Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk tweeted (opens in new tab) shortly after the static fire, which occurred at 1:51 PM EST (1851 GMT) and lasted approximately 10 seconds. The test was videotaped by observers such as: NASASpaceFlight (opens in new tab) and Rocket Ranch Boca Chica (opens in new tab).
Related: SpaceX restarts Starship Super Heavy booster in long engine test
Static fires are common preflight tests in which a rocket’s engines are briefly ignited while the vehicle remains anchored to the ground.
And SpaceX is gearing up for a flight with Starship — the program’s first orbital test mission, which will apparently involve Booster 7 and an upper-stage prototype known as Ship 24. That historic flight could be launched before the end of the year, Musk said.
Today’s static fire could be a big step toward orbital launch: It doubled the previous highest number of Raptor engines ignited by SpaceX during a Starship engine test. But there is still a lot of work to be done to demonstrate Booster 7’s flight readiness; the vehicle has a whopping 33 Raptors.
Ship 24 has six Raptor engines. SpaceX set them all on fire at once during a 8 Sept. static fire.
SpaceX develops Starship to take people and cargo to the moon and Marsas well as performing a variety of other spaceflight tasks.
Starship prototypes have flown a handful of test flights so far, but none have gotten higher than about 6 miles in the air. And none of them involved a Super Heavy vehicle.
SpaceX has already inked a number of customers for Starship, including NASA, which chose the vehicle as the first manned lander for its Artemis program of lunar research. If all goes according to plan, astronauts will land on the lunar surface in 2025 or 2026 aboard Starship on the Artemis 3 mission.
Private customers have also signed up to join Starship on missions around the moon (not to the surface). Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa booked a whole flightand space tourism pioneer Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko bought two chairs on another mission.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on 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).
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