The SpaceX Starhopper lifted off to the limits of the tether. The SpaceX hop tests seem to be progressing quite well but the main question is when there will be two more raptor engines placed into the Starhopper for real height on the tests.
Starhopper just lifted off & hit tether limits! pic.twitter.com/eByJsq2jiw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 6, 2019
SOURCES- Twitter Elon Musk
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Here’s the secret that has been kept hidden from you.
Nobody wants you to know this, but I’ll spill the beans.
Type “Chang’e-4” into Google and hit the search button
That’s it! Now you get 1 780 000 links to news stories and discussions. All those reports that have been kept secret from you, they were all there.
Those barstards will never keep secrets from you again.
Now try it with “SpaceX Starhopper” . Look at that, 337 000 hits. It’s almost as though it was never kept secret in the first place. Magic.
NDS is androgynous, you know. Kinky.
where can you find real current news of the hopper,it is BLACKED OUT in all the medis same for the brilliant CHINESE MOON ROVER, Chang’e-4 mission???
DID it break down and quit?
when/where will the FIRST HOP HAPPEN?
I hope it hops down to Houston and lands is nasty liars nasa LAPS!
We actually have to wait for the orbital docking scenes.
Softcore. For the good parts we’ll have to wait some months.
This one will get 3. The (ostensibly) next iteration up for testing is an orbital prototype being built next to this very first vehicle.
It stands to reason that the first stage SH will have at least some pre-production testing. Either off shore near Boca Chica or in Florida or elsewhere, as neither current locations at BC seem suitable for the thrust of dozens of raptors.
Starship is the same diameter as the first stage SH, but it’s doubtful (even by SpaceX’s sometimes surprising strategies) that Starship prototypes will ever get more than the 7(?) Raptors that are planned for production SS’s.
IIRC Starhopper is already the diameter of production design. Nine meters.
Doesn’t look like 23 Raptors could fit on this initial test rig. Will we see larger/wider test rigs in the future, featuring more raptors on them? How do you think this progression will go?
It looks like park of the set for Smells like teen spirit.
That looks freaking amazing….is this technically rocket porn?
I want to get out the rotisserie and smoke some chicken
one raptor puts on a good show…. I’m wondering what 23 of them would look like…
maybe they should install some fans to push the smoke out of the way…
If it can hop one foot, it can hop as high as its propellant load will let it.
It can probably hop to hundreds of feet on just one engine.
If you love something, set it free…