SpaceX simply fired up its latest Starship spacecraft on Thursday (July 31), to assist prep the automobile for an upcoming take a look at flight.
The corporate carried out a “static fireplace” trial with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Starship higher stage at its Starbase website in South Texas on Thursday, briefly igniting one of many automobile’s six Raptor engines.
“Starship single-engine static fireplace demonstrating an in-space burn full on Pad 1 at Starbase,” SpaceX wrote in a Thursday night X post that shared two pictures and a video of the milestone.
The take a look at is a part of the prep work for Flight 10 of Starship, the massive, absolutely reusable rocket that SpaceX is creating to assist humanity colonize Mars and do all kinds of different spaceflight work.
Starship consists of two components — the upper-stage spacecraft, referred to as Starship or just Ship, and an enormous booster often called Tremendous Heavy. Each are product of stainless-steel and are powered by Raptors (33 of them in Tremendous Heavy’s case).
This explicit Ship is the second that SpaceX has earmarked for Flight 10. The primary exploded on a test stand at Starbase on June 18 simply earlier than a deliberate static-fire take a look at.
The Tremendous Heavy that can fly on Flight 10 has already handed its static-fire take a look at, igniting all 33 of its engines on June 6.
SpaceX has not but introduced a goal date for Flight 10, however we might not have to attend lengthy for it: firm founder and CEO Elon Musk has stated the take a look at mission will launch in August.
A totally stacked Starship first flew in April 2023. The large rocket has launched 3 times thus far this 12 months, in January, March and Might. On all three flights, SpaceX misplaced the higher stage earlier than its deliberate Indian Ocean splashdown.