SpaceX has performed a static test fire of a Super Heavy booster in preparation for the 11th flight of the mighty Starship rocket. The test took place at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas on Sunday.
A date has yet to be set for the Starship’s 11th flight, but it’s widely thought that it could take place at the end of this month or early next.
The first-stage Super Heavy fired its Raptor engines for about 10 seconds in an awesome display of rocket power. You can watch it in the video below:
Static fire complete for the Super Heavy booster preparing for Starship’s eleventh flight test pic.twitter.com/1qkypMOd7I
Space-based news site NASASpaceflight also shared some slow-motion footage of the same test fire:
SpaceX has completed the Static Fire of Booster 15-2 as a key milestone ahead of Flight 11. This test marked the final Super Heavy Static Fire on Pad 1 in its current configuration.https://t.co/RUNy0761Jc pic.twitter.com/G94lQWOi53
The Super Heavy booster forms the main stage of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which generates a colossal 17 million pounds of thrust at launch, making it the most powerful rocket ever built. This particular booster flew for the first time in the Starship’s eighth test in March 2025.
The Starship’s first-ever test flight took place in 2023, and since then SpaceX has been working to improve the rocket’s design to make it ready for prime time. But it still has some way to go to reach that goal. When the Starship is fully operational, SpaceX will work with NASA to use the vehicle to send crew and cargo to the moon and possibly even to Mars, too.
The most recent Starship test flight took place on August 26 and was deemed the most successful yet, with both the booster and the upper-stage spacecraft achieving a number of mission goals before performing controlled landings on open water.
The plan is to have both parts of the rocket land back at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in a maneuver using giant mechanical arms to cradle each vehicle just before it touches the ground. SpaceX has actually achieved this several times with the Super Heavy booster. In the most recent flight, however, the booster performed an ocean landing as SpaceX was trying a more challenging descent path and so didn’t want to risk damaging the launch site. The spaceflight company may attempt its first spacecraft landing back at base in the first half of next year.
Landing the reusable booster and spacecraft back at Starbase will allow a faster turnaround time for subsequent flights.
If the data for Sunday’s Super Heavy test comes back clean, SpaceX will test the Starship spacecraft’s engines as part of the final preparations for the 11th flight.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.