SpaceX Conducts First Starship Hot Fire with Three Raptor Engines
SpaceX accomplished the first hot fire of a Starship prototype outfitted with three Raptor engines. The vehicle is being prepared for a flight to 15 km (~50,000 ft) from its test site at Boca Chica Beach in Texas.
12 responses to “SpaceX Conducts First Starship Hot Fire with Three Raptor Engines”
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Nosecone mated to barrel section yesterday. Pre-dawn three-engine static fire today. Now there’s just the mating of the uppers to the lowers and another hot fire to go before SN8 can fly stratospheric looking like a by-golly Bob Heinlein rocketship. A matter of days now.
SN8 in Oct. SN9 and SN10 in Nov. SN11, SN12 and SH01, separately, in Dec. With eight more customer missions and maybe a half-dozen more Starlink missions scheduled through year-end, there’s going to be some major SpaceX doings every few days for the rest of the year. Next year seems certain to be busier still – x 2 perhaps.
I wouldn’t be surprised if another cycle of leak tests/cyro tests and static fire after the fore-body is mated. The LOX header tank and associated plumbing is new for the configuration.
Certainly another static fire. Any preceding pressure and cryo testing will probably involve only the header tank and associated plumbing in the nose but I could be wrong about that. Perhaps the whole system needs to be involved based on its design.
The annual Starship update presentation was supposed to take place in Oct., but I have seen no confirmation of this and no firm date designated. I wonder whether it has been delayed by the engine investigation for F9? I also wonder whether the intent is to do it pre- or post-flight anent SN8? Perhaps the whole thing will now be delayed into Nov. or Dec. while Starship testing proceeds? Perhaps the intended “backdrop” for the presentation is to be SH1?
I doubt the delay is for that. Remember the first ITS presentation was when SpaceX was grounded for AMOS-6.
Edit: https://twitter.com/elonmus…
Well should have mentioned it two hops ago. But Starship grabs the prize for the first gradual flight program starting with basic hops. And of course, Space X add the unique part of a unique program, the second stage went first.
The DC-X started with basic hops, the first flight was just 59 seconds. The rockets that proceeded the New Shepard also did basic hops, but the video was never well publicized. Armadillo Aerospace also followed that route. But the all these vehicles were much smaller and were intended as SSTO vehicles.
Hummm. yes, but those were never going to be orbital vehicles in even the basic form of the hoppers that they were. Hydro Lox systems are really hard to make into SSTOs. Nothing Armadillo did was ever going to reach orbital velocities. Starships super abundance of hydrocarbon dense fuels and LOX give it the kinds of margins it’ll need to become operational. I still think I can argue that Starship is the first viable orbital class launch vehicle that began its flight program in finely sliced gradual steps.
Suborbital, not SSTO, for Blue’s trailblazer vehicles, including New Shepard, as well as all the Armadillo stuff. Even DC-X wasn’t intended to be SSTO in its subscale test version. It was supposed to pathfind for a much larger vehicle that was to be SSTO.
I was born in 1955. Last week SpaceX painted a nose cone white as a mockup for their Lunar Starship! Well it is about time! Perhaps they should change the name to Moonliner.
Check this out! 🙂
https://www.google.com/sear…
That was part of the original incarnation of Disneyland that opened when you were still in diapers. But it was long gone by the time I moved from Michigan to the L.A. area in 1974.
True. Gives a whole new spin to the term “top-down development” doesn’t it?
Of course, if one were to be perfectly pedantic about the test process we’ve seen, it really starts in the middle and then progresses first upward, then downward. Singular, no matter how described.
Second stage first is pretty unique but also something that, more or less Blue, also did. NS is basically a cryogenic second stage with an SL nozzle on it. This became more clear when they went for the configuration change to use BE-3U on NG. Or course a lot more gradatim than SpaceX.