SpaceX is aiming to fly its next-gen Super Heavy booster next month, according to a recent post on X by the company’s CEO, Elon Musk.
As part of the Starship rocket that also includes the upper-stage Ship spacecraft, the Super Heavy is the most powerful booster ever built and has so far flown 11 times, with varying degrees of success.
SpaceX has just rolled out the new rocket, called Booster 19, for preflight testing, and on Sunday it shared some video clips captured by a drone. You can watch the footage by selecting the top left image in the post below.
Booster 19 preparing to begin prelaunch testing pic.twitter.com/ga1tfCvVSD
The third version of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster stands at 124.4 meters, making it just over a meter taller than its predecessor.
For the first time, it features Raptor 3 engines instead of Raptor 2s, with upgrades including greater thrust and better efficiency.
The new rocket design also helps to increase the Ship’s payload capacity by some 40 tons, increasing it to 100-plus tons for missions in which both the Super Heavy and Ship can be recovered.
Version 3 comes with new docking adapters, too, for the important in-orbit fuel transfer process that will allow the Ship to fly onwards to other celestial bodies such as the moon and even Mars.
Notably, the 12th Starship flight will be the first to launch from SpaceX’s newly built Pad 2 at its Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas. Up to now, all flights have started at Pad 1, which is being rebuilt. SpaceX also has plans to begin launches from a new pad on the Space Coast in Florida later this year as it seeks to rapidly ramp up Starship testing.
SpaceX has yet to share a detailed flight plan for its upcoming Starship test, so we don’t currently know whether the Super Heavy will land back at base or on water. As for the Ship, It seems likely that the upper stage will attempt another controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, though hopefully at some point this year we’ll witness the first attempt by SpaceX to bring the Ship back to Starbase.
NASA is closely watching Starship’s progress as it’s planning to use a modified version of the Ship to land two astronauts on the lunar surface in the Artemis III mission currently scheduled for 2027, though that date could slip.
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.