Starship completed its first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal at Starbase today. This was the first time an integrated Ship and Booster were fully loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant.
The next steps are :
1. Destacking, restacking and then the test of all 33 Raptor engines.
2. Rolling back to the bay for a complete inspection
3. FAA approval and the orbital launch
Starship completed its first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal at Starbase today. This was the first time an integrated Ship and Booster were fully loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant pic.twitter.com/btprGNGZ1G
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 24, 2023
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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Your bio is longer than the story……🤣🤣🤣
It’s nice to see progress being made, even if it is not as quick as many of us would have wanted.
In any case, good luck to the people at SpaceX! Let’s hope they can manage to bring down the cost to orbit by another factor of 10…
Speed is really unimportant now. Even if things go wrong and launch is delayed after summer, in the meantime they’ll have produced really a lot of Raptor engines. Once they work out
all the bugs, the cadence of launch will -literally- skyrocket. Being hasted now risks one
of the biggest man-made non-nuclear explosions ever. They should build a catch tower, though, any damage to launch tower wont smooth operations. No, I cannot pay for it.
Speed is not unimportant at all; speed is the reason why SpaceX was able to innovate so much in this industry. Remember, at the time of SN20 it wasn’t even expected to get to orbit, much less survive reentry; but the telemetry of the flight would direct the development of the further prototypes so that they could do incrementally better in the following flights.
Nowadays, I see people worrying whether the tower would be able to catch the second stage in this first launch attempt. That ought to be a good deal into the future; the goals for the first test ought to be much simpler than that. Although with all these delays I cannot imagine how many design iterations are going to be shelved, instead.