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SpaceX, the company that set out to bring humanity to Mars, took a big step toward achieving its goal in today’s tests of its Starship spacecraft. Starship, who is Elon Musk’s millennial hawk, has passed a very crucial test, the “cryogenic pressure” test, which had started chasing the company. Until now, the test had been performed 3 times, without fruit. But today, Elon Musk announced the Starship success story, tweeting “SN4 passed the cryo test!”
As part of this test, the spacecraft was filled with freezing liquid nitrogen (an ultra-cool propellant) in its fuel tank to simulate conditions experienced during operational missions, in the empty vacuum of space. After failing 3 of these tests, SpaceX engineers finally managed to succeed at SpaceX’s South Texas site near the town of Boca Chica.
SN4 involves a lone Raptor engine, which was first demonstrated in a Starhopper subscale demonstrator. With a single engine, SN4 will be able to make short flights to test features, but it’s a far cry from the end product, which is expected to house 6 of these engines. However, the company is gaining a lot of momentum, and Elon Musk predicts that the next version of the spacecraft prototype, SN5, will come equipped with 3 fully operational Raptor engines.
Starship is now ready to move on to the next stage of testing: engine testing. Beneath this, the Raptor engine on the SN4 will catch fire (Mars is the RED planet after all), which is expected to take place as soon as next week. After being set on fire, SN4 will be subject to even more atrocities, including unmanned flight at a height of about 150m, which is roughly the same performance target as StarHopper.
The Starhopper was the stocky cousin of SN4, which was lowered to show off the space company’s Raptor engine, earlier this year. He soon withdrew after the demonstration.
The fully operational 6-engine version of StarShip will take off from Earth on a gigantic rocket known as the Super Heavy, which will come equipped with 37 Raptor engines. Both devices, Starship and Super Heavy, will be reusable, as will the company’s famous Falcon 9 rockets. By making use of this duo, SpaceX will be able to send people to Mars from the Moon in the very near future.
Elon, unsurprisingly, hopes to build LOTS of spacecraft, and plans to send a huge fleet of 100-passenger vehicles to Mars every 26 months, once it’s operational.
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