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The latest from SpaceX Starship The prototype has just started its engines for the second time, potentially paving the way for a 15km-high test flight in the near future.
The SN8 vehicle (“Serial No. 8”) exploded for a few seconds Tuesday evening (November 10) in a “static fire” test at SpaceX facilities in southern Texas near the seaside village of Boca Chica. The video of the test was captured by the South Padre Island tourist site Spadre.com.
Static fires, in which rocket engines ignite while the vehicle remains on the ground, are a common pre-launch check. SN8 had already performed one of these tests in the early hours of October 20.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s Mars colonizing vehicles in pictures
Tuesday’s trial was more dramatic than the first in a couple of ways. First of all, this time SN8 looked a lot more like a real spaceship than last month, sporting a cone that SpaceX personnel had. stacked on top of her previously naked body on October 22.
Additionally, Tuesday’s static fire saw some minor fireworks; the ignition of the engine briefly sent sparks, or flaming fragments of something, flying into the Texas night. But SN8 emerged apparently intact, so if anything non-nominal happened, it didn’t appear to be serious.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation spaceflight system, which the company is developing to help colonize Mars, launch satellites into orbit, and do everything else SpaceX needs. The system consists of a 50-meter-tall spacecraft called Starship and a giant rocket known as Super Heavy, which will take its partner vehicle out of Earth. (The spaceship will be powerful enough to launch from the Moon and Mars, founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk he said.)
Both of these fully reusable vehicles will be powered by SpaceX’s new Raptor engine. The spaceship will have six Raptors and Super Heavy will have around 30.
SpaceX is moving towards the final design of the spaceship through a series of increasingly ambitious prototypes. For example, SN8 features three Raptors, while none of its predecessors had more than one.
These three engines will carry the SN8 much higher than any other prototype spaceship – about 9 miles (15 km) up, Musk said. To date, three starship vehicles have taken off, all flying at a maximum altitude of around 150 meters. The squat Starhopper did so in the summer of 2019, and SN5 and SN6 followed suit in August and September of this year respectively.
SN8’s big leap may be just around the corner now. In a Twitter of September, Musk said the test plan for SN8 included “static fire, crates, static fire, flight at 60,000 feet and back.” (He later changed the altitude target slightly downward.)
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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