According to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX’s sixth large-scale test prototype has successfully completed a key static fire test of its Raptor engines. The so-called “SN5” spacecraft prototype is now ready to move on to a short 150-meter (nearly 500-foot) flight test, which would mark the furthest so far that one of these test spacecraft has passed the SpaceX’s planned development program.
SpaceX has been building and testing Starship prototypes (which are designated by the “SN” followed by their sequential number) since last year, after the company first built a subscale demonstrator that was basically made up of the base. of a spaceship. with a single Raptor engine mounted to demonstrate low altitude landing and flight capabilities.
Since then, SpaceX has been building large-scale demonstration prototypes for more test flights, initially looking to conduct high-altitude testing immediately. These were known as Mk1 and Mk2, and Mk1 was destroyed during pressure tank tests, while Mk2 was scrapped and the company turned its attention to Mk3 (renamed SN1, beginning the new naming convention for the series). The prototypes that have been developed since then have been quickly built and tested, with SN3 and SN4 suffering catastrophic failure during the testing process.
However, SpaceX has successfully tested the SN5 prototype as of today, and will now move on to the first low-altitude “jump” flight of the large-scale prototype test vehicle.
Ultimately, SpaceX hopes to replace all of its launch vehicles with Starship, including Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, as well as use it with its upcoming Super Heavy booster to transport large cargo loads to Mars to establish a permanent human presence on The Red Planet. Obviously, he still has a lot of testing and lots of iterations to go through before reaching that lofty goal, but Musk and SpaceX seem interested in a fast-paced iteration and testing with a relatively public audience. Extensive testing is pretty standard for space vehicle development, but doing it out in the open is novel, just like the speed with which SpaceX is creating real test articles and then using the results to create new versions (and hopefully improved ones) ).
