SpaceX’s flagship Starship spacecraft has been the protagonist of a new ground test, which anticipates the next third launch. Elon Musk’s aerospace company conducted a static fire today with the most recent prototype, known as Ship 28. The test took the form of a brief firing of the Raptor engines, while the spacecraft remained docked to the pad at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas.
Starship is therefore being prepared for its third test flight, which SpaceX aims to launch in the coming weeks. There are no exact dates yet, but at the moment it seems that everything is going in the right direction and perhaps as early as January we could see something concrete. The company published the recent success of the static fire test on X, while also sharing a stunning slow-motion of the operation.
We remind you that Starship is composed of two elements, although often its name identifies only the second stage, the upper one and which will one day house the cargo areas and the crew areas. The first stage of Starship is called Super Heavy, and in this case it played no role. Both components of the spacecraft are designed to be fully and quickly reusable and are powered by Raptor engines, on which SpaceX has worked hard in recent months to improve their performance and reliability. Super Heavy has 33 Raptors, while Starship has only 6 of them, and in the final version they will be slightly different, as they are perfected to work in the absence of atmosphere.
So far, Starship has failed to complete all the proposed objectives for the first sub-orbital launch, but the second time there was a clear step forward and we finally saw the two stages separate properly. During the first test in April, this step had failed, and SpaceX intentionally chose to blow up the spacecraft four minutes after liftoff. With the second round in November, something more has been done and the step of dividing the two stadiums has been passed. The first stage then exploded during descent. As for Starship, the flight proceeded seemingly smoothly for a few minutes, but the spacecraft also finally met the same fate when it reached about halfway through the predetermined path. In any case, the latest telemetry signal from launch has set Starship’s altitude at 148 kilometers high.
It will be very interesting to see how the next test proceeds and whether SpaceX will attempt to conclude the planned leg, which should end with the controlled landing of the second stage in the ocean north of Kauai, Hawaii.
