STATIC FULL-ENGINE FIRE TEST FOR STARSHIP ANY DAY; ORBITAL FLIGHT WITH SATELLITES FEBRUARY, EARLY MARCH

By Jeff Foust, Space News and

Eric Mack, CNET

Ready for the Big Bang?

Elon Musk is. 

And if you live withing a 15-mile radius of the SpaceX Starship Starbase at Boca Chica, you better get ready to lose a few windows to the blast. SpaceX adjusters already know who you are.

SpaceX could attempt a long-awaited static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines in its Super Heavy booster as soon as this coming week, weather permitting. It would be one of the final technical milestones before an orbital launch attempt.

It would be the last step before Musk launches an orbital flight that could see the launching of the Starship with a payload of Starlink communication satellites, according to a SpaceX source. The same source said that another four such craft are on hand for future flights.

Speaking on a panel at the AIAA SciTech Forum, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability, said the company was preparing for the test at its Starbase test site at Boca Chica.

“If things go well, maybe next week we’ll have a 33-engine static fire,” he said. “We still have a lot of work in front of us to get there and it’s not easy.”

The Starship consists of two reusable elements, a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft known as Starship. Both are powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine – 33 for Super Heavy and six for Starship.

(Visualization by Austin Barnard, Teslarati)

 A static firing will see the booster secured to a test stand so it can't go anywhere while its engines are lit up briefly to test them and gather data on how they perform in preparation for launch. SpaceX conducted test firings of Booster 7 last year, but only with a fraction of the engines it's designed to carry. This will be the first time a fully loaded Super Heavy with all 33 engines is ignited.

Earlier this month, SpaceX stacked the Ship 24 upper-stage prototype atop the Booster 7 Super Heavy variant at Starbase, the company's South Texas facility. And on Monday (Jan. 23), the company performed a landmark "wet dress rehearsal" with the duo, practicing many launch-day procedures – including loading the vehicles' tanks with more than 10 million pounds (4.5 million kilograms) of supercold liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant.

Both the Super Heavy booster, called Booster 7, and the Starship upper stage, named Ship 24, were loaded with propellants and taken through a practice countdown.

SpaceX destacked the Starship from the Super Heavy Jan. 25, a move that the company said was part of preparations for the static fire. “Launch and catch tower destacked Ship 24 from Booster 7 on the orbital pad today ahead of the Booster’s static fire test,” the company tweeted.

Both the company and NASA, which is monitoring Starship test activities given the vehicle’s use in the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign, had identified both the wet dress rehearsal and the 33-engine static-fire test as two major remaining milestones before the vehicle is ready, at least technically, for an orbital launch. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration before it can conduct a launch.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted earlier in the month that he thought the company could be ready for an orbital launch as soon as late February, with March “highly likely.” However, SpaceX has missed past schedule estimates he has offered on Starship’s first orbital flight

“Every launch has a high risk associated with it. I don’t fear the failure, but what are we going to learn from this launch and are we taking this risk for a certain benefit?” he said. “So, I trade that benefit of what we’re going to get out of this activity versus the cost of doing the activity, and what is the potential for learning.”

Starship is essential not just for NASA’s plans to return humans to the Moon but also SpaceX’s deployment its second-generation Starlink constellation and, ultimately, sending humans to Mars. “We’re going to try and take that vision, that future vision we’ve seen in science fiction,” Gerstenmaier said, “and we’re going to try to turn it into reality.”

The rocket that Elon Musk aims to use to send astronauts to the moon, and many more humans to Mars, could make its first orbital flight within weeks, and SpaceX is now going through some of the final items on its checklist to prepare.

Reports and action from the company's Starbase rocket development facility in Texas point toward a possible static firing of Booster 7, an early prototype of the Super Heavy booster designed to push Starship out of the atmosphere, as soon as late February or the middle of March.

Starship last flew in 2021 in a series of high-altitude flights that saw early prototypes of the craft, sans Super Heavy booster, skim the atmosphere and come back for a landing attempt. The next launch will be an orbital flight that sees Super Heavy launch Starship to orbit before separating and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX has also mentioned the possibility of landing on a modified oil rig or using large mechanical arms on the launch tower to "catch" the returning rocket.

Meanwhile, Starship will continue on to orbit for a short trip to space before splashing down off the coast of Hawaii.

If all goes well, 2023 will see more Starship tests as SpaceX prepares to assist NASA and its Artemis program by eventually sending cargo and astronauts to the moon later this decade.