SpaceX has just conducted its most ambitious and powerful test yet with its Starship Mars rocket.
SpaceX ignited 14 Raptor engines on Booster 7, a prototype of Starship’s Super Heavy first-stage rocket, during a “static fire” test today (November 14) at Starbase, the company’s facility in southern Texas.
“Full 14-engine test time,” SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted (opens in a new tab) shortly after the static fire, which occurred at 1:51 p.m. EST (6:51 p.m. GMT) and lasted approximately 10 seconds. The test was filmed by observers such as NASASpaceFlight (opens in a new tab) and Rocket Ranch Boca Chica (opens in a new tab).
Related: SpaceX launches Starship Super Heavy booster again in long engine test
Static fires are common pre-flight tests in which a rocket’s engines are briefly ignited while the vehicle remains anchored to the ground.
And SpaceX is preparing 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. This historic flight could launch before the end of the month. year, Musk said. .
Today’s static fire could be a big step toward orbital liftoff: it doubled the previous highest number of Raptor engines SpaceX fired during a Starship engine test. But there is still a lot of work to be done to demonstrate the flight readiness of Booster 7; the vehicle features a whopping 33 Raptors.
Ship 24 sports six Raptor engines. SpaceX ignited them all simultaneously during a static fire on September 8.
SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to the Moon and Mars, as well as perform various other spaceflight tasks.
The prototype spacecraft have made a handful of test flights so far, but none of them have exceeded about 10 kilometers in the sky. And none of them involved a super heavy vehicle.
SpaceX has already signed a number of customers for Starship, including NASA, which has chosen the vehicle as the first manned lander for its Artemis lunar exploration program. If all goes as planned, astronauts will land on the lunar surface in 2025 or 2026 aboard Starship for the Artemis 3 mission.
Private customers have also signed up to fly Starship on missions around the moon (not to its surface). Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa booked an entire flight, for example, and space tourism pioneer Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko bought two seats for a different mission.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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