Starship hardware has made it to the pad ahead of a planned liftoff this week.
SpaceX posted photos on X today (Feb. 25) showing Super Heavy, the giant first stage of its Starship megarocket, being lifted onto the orbital launch mount at its Starbase site in South Texas.
The milestone keeps the company on track to launch the eighth-ever Starship test flight this Friday (Feb. 28).
SpaceX is developing Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other exploration feats.
The 403.5-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket consists of two elements, both of which are fully reusable: Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short.
Starship has flown seven times to date, most recently on Jan. 16. That mission was a mixed bag; SpaceX caught Super Heavy with the “chopstick” arms of Starbase’s launch tower about seven minutes after liftoff as planned, but Ship suffered a serious problem and ended up detonating over the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX recently wrapped up its anomaly investigation, which traced the cause to unexpectedly high stresses in Ship’s propulsion system during flight. Those stresses led to a propellant leak, which caused engine shutdowns and ultimately triggered the vehicle’s autonomous flight termination system.
Related: SpaceX catches Super Heavy booster on Starship Flight 7 test but loses upper stage (video, photos)
Flight 8’s goals will be similar to those of Flight 7, SpaceX has said. The company will attempt another Super Heavy chopsticks catch, and Ship will attempt to deploy four dummy Starlink satellites on a suborbital trajectory. (The vehicle carried 10 mock Starlinks on Flight 7 but never got the chance the deploy them.)
If all goes to plan, Ship will splash down in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia about 66 minutes after launch.
Article by:Source: mwall@space.com (Mike Wall)
