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The last SpaceX Starship prototype has just launched its engines for the second time, potentially paving the way for a 15-kilometer-high test flight in the near future.
The SN8 vehicle (“Serial No. 8”) caught fire for a few seconds Tuesday evening (November 10) during a “static fire” test at SpaceX’s facilities in South Texas, near the seaside village of Boca Chica. Video of the test was captured by South Padre Island tourist site Spadre.com.
Static fires, in which rocket engines ignite while the vehicle remains on the ground, are a common pre-launch check. SN8 had already carried out such a test in the wee hours of October 20.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: the vehicles colonizing SpaceX’s Mars in pictures
Tuesday’s trial was more dramatic than the first in many ways. First off, SN8 looked a lot more like a real spaceship this time than last month, sporting a nose cone that SpaceX staff had. stacked on top of her previously naked body October 22.
In addition, Tuesday’s static fire featured some minor fireworks; the ignition of the engine briefly sent sparks or flaming shards of something, flying through the Texas night. But SN8 apparently appeared intact, so if anything abnormal happened it didn’t seem to matter.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation space flight system, which the company is developing to help colonize Mars, launch satellites into orbit, and do whatever SpaceX needs. The system consists of a 165-foot-tall (50-meter) spacecraft called the Starship and a giant rocket known as the Super Heavy, which will push its partner vehicle away from Earth. (Starship will be powerful enough to launch off the moon and Mars, SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon musk said.)
These two fully reusable vehicles will be powered by SpaceX’s new Raptor engine. Starship will carry six Raptors and Super Heavy will have around 30.
SpaceX is iterating towards the final design of the Starship via a series of increasingly ambitious prototypes. For example, SN8 has three Raptors, while none of its predecessors had more than one.
All three of these engines will carry SN8s much taller than any other Starship prototype – around 10 miles tall, Musk said. To date, three Starship vehicles have lifted off the ground, all flying at a maximum altitude of around 150 meters. The stubby Starhopper made it in the summer of 2019, and SN5 and SN6 followed suit in August and September of this year, respectively.
SN8’s big leap could be imminent now. In one September tweet, Musk said the test plan for SN8 involved “static fire, checks, static fire, fly 60,000 feet and back.” (He later changed the altitude target a bit.)
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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