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SpaceX fired the engines on its last Starship prototype for the third time on Thursday evening (November 12), but the test was bumpy.
The Starship SN8 vehicle carried out its third brief “static fire” – a test in which the engines are ignited while a rocket remains attached to the ground – at SpaceX facilities in South Texas on Thursday, near the village of Boca Chica.
Shortly after the test, which several outside organizations broadcast live on the web, material was seen apparently streaming from the SN8 base. It sounded strange, and the founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon musk soon confirmed that something abnormal had happened.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: the vehicles colonizing SpaceX’s Mars in pictures
“We lost the vehicle’s pneumatic system. Reason not known at this time. The pressure in the liquid oxygen tank is increasing. Hopefully the disc bursts to relieve the pressure, otherwise it will blow the plug,” Musk said via Twitter Thursday evening. (Rupture discs are single-use devices that, like valves, seal off different sections or systems of a vehicle. They release pressure when they open, as Musk noted.)
The cause of the problem is unknown at this time, Musk said in another tweet Thursday: “Maybe melted an engine pre-burner or hot gas fuel manifold. Either way, it caused pneumatic loss. We have to design this problem.”
This is the bad news. The good news is that the burst disk has done its job and SN8 is still in one piece.
“The burst drive has worked so the vehicle seems to be doing fine. We will need to replace at least one of the motors,” Musk said in another tweet.
The burst disk worked, so the vehicle appears to be fine. We’ll have to swap at least one of the engines.November 13, 2020
The SN8 (“Serial No. 8”) has three Raptors, SpaceX’s powerful next-generation engine that runs on liquid methane and liquid oxygen. No previous spacecraft prototype had more than one Raptor.
The SN8 static fires – the first two occurred on October 20 and November 10 – are intended to pave the way for a 15 kilometer high test flight in the near future. It would be much higher than any of its predecessors. The truncated Starhopper spacecraft and the SN5 and SN6 prototypes reached maximum altitudes of around 500 feet (150 meters) during their flights, which took place in the summer of 2019 and last August and September, respectively. (SN8 also sports a nose cone and stabilizer flaps to help it handle the more ambitious upcoming flight.)
Thursday night’s setback will delay SN8’s big leap, but by how much we’ll have to wait and see.
The Starship system consists of a 165ft tall (50m) vehicle called the Starship and a huge rocket known as the Super Heavy, both of which will be fully and quickly reusable. Starship’s final starship will have six Raptors, and Super Heavy will be powered by around 30 of the engines.
SpaceX sees Starship as the pioneering transportation system that will make the colonization of Mars – Musk’s long-standing ambition – economically feasible. If all goes according to plan, Starship will also meet all of SpaceX’s other in-flight needs, from launching satellites and cleaning up space debris to carrying passengers on super-fast “point-to-point” journeys around the world.
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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