SpaceX’s Next-Gen Starship vehicle Just took a big step towards its next landmark leap.
Early this morning (October 20), SpaceX His S.N. (“Serial number” “) three Raptor engines lit, near the beachside village of Boca Chika, the starship prototype in a brief” steady fire “test at the company’s South Texas site.
Neither SpaceX nor the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk The trial was publicly commented on until the trial was published, but it seemed to be going well. (SpaceX observers are constantly monitoring the Boca Chika site, so there is a third-party video of the static fire.)
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing vehicles in images
Starship SN8 Static Fire !! First time Triple Raptor Static Fire! Mary (@Bokachikagal) documents history again! Https: //t.co/UGPoVVF5dt pic.twitter.com/NzCimSNp9O20 October October 2020
A stationary fire, in which the engine is ignited while the projection vehicle remains on the ground, is a common precursor to flight. And the SN8 has a launch to come – an unresolved test flight later this month or so, which, if all goes according to plan, will reach a maximum altitude of about 11 miles (18 kilometers).
It will be the highest ever, starship prototype ever flown. The previous three, single-engine iterations, reached about 500 feet (150 meters), most recently in August and September of this year, when SN5 and SN6 vehicles soared into the sky.
The SN5 and SN6 looked like grain silos, as SN8 does now. But the new vehicle will look more spaceship-y when the new cone and ient reentation-controlling body flops into the game, Kasturi said.
Those features will be installed soon. But before that could happen, S.N. 8 can perform another static fire. Inside Tweeted last monthThe SN8 plan includes “static fire, checkout, static fire, 60,000 feet and rear flight,” Musk said.
Many prototypes are reporting the final formation of all Starship, which Musk said will operate six Raptors – three “sea surface” versions like the one that was flown this morning and three “vacuum” variants with very large nozzles, which are in-space. Optimized for use. The 165-foot-tall (50-meter) Starship vehicle will land on Earth from a giant rocket called Super Heavy, which will play a game of its own 30 Raptors.
Both vehicles will be fully and quickly reusable. SpaceX ultimately seeks to use Starship and Super Heavy for all of its spaceflight needs, from launching satellites to carrying people and payloads to the moon, Mars and other distant locations.
For example, Starship is preparing to provide crew lunar landing services for NASA Artemis program, Which aims to land two astronauts at the moon’s south pole in 2024.
The router engine is also suitable for Mars colonization, which is one of the main long-term goals of Musk and SpaceX. The reactor is fueled by liquid oxygen and methane, both of which can be effectively built on the Red Planet with the help of local resources, Kasturi stressed. (Merlin engines, which power SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy rockets, use a variety of liquid oxygen and kerosene.)
Mike W. Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the quest for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @Mamildld. Follow us on Twitter @speed.com or Facebook.
