Super Heavy is breathing fire again.
SpaceX fired up the engines on its Super Heavy booster yesterday (July 15), ahead of Starship’s next integrated flight test (IFT), which is expected to take place in the coming weeks. IFT-5 will be the fifth launch of Starship’s fully loaded vehicle, and the most ambitious yet.
The spacecraft has been contracted by NASA to be the lunar lander for the Artemis 3 mission, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted it could eventually carry humans to Mars.
The 233-foot (71-meter) booster was rolled into the launch pad at SpaceX’s test site on July 9, ahead of yesterday’s full “static test firing” at the company’s Starbase facility in Texas. With Super Heavy strapped to the launch pad, the rocket’s 33 Raptor engines fired at full power for about 20 seconds in video captured by SpaceX and shared in a post on X.
Full duration static fire of Flight 5 Super Heavy booster pic.twitter.com/8rF9KUdMUDJuly 15, 2024
Each of Starship’s four test flights has gone further and accomplished more than its predecessor, with the rocket’s most recent launch in June being hailed as a complete success. That launch saw Starship and its Super Heavy booster both return, as planned, for controlled ocean splashdowns. Now, hoping to build on that success, SpaceX will attempt to reach even further on Starship’s fifth flight.
Related: SpaceX delivers Starship Super Heavy booster to launch pad for fifth test flight (video, photos)
Starship is designed to be a fully reusable system. Like the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster, Super Heavy is designed with grid fins to help control its reentry through the atmosphere, but unlike the current workhorse of SpaceX’s fleet, the plan is for Super Heavy to fly directly back to the pad from which it launched once it lands.
The Starship launch tower features two massive “chopstick” arms designed to catch Super Heavy by its grid fins as the booster slows its momentum to a momentary halt in mid-air before succumbing to the tender embrace of the chopsticks. This way, in the event of a rapid refurbishment attempt, the booster is already where it needs to be to launch again.
During its fourth flight, even though Super Heavy’s ocean landing burn was nowhere near its launch pad in Starbase, Texas, SpaceX closed the launch tower’s chopstick arms in conjunction with the booster’s water landing, ostensibly to test the system’s timing and capabilities. Now they’re going to try it for real. Following the success of IFT-4, Musk wrote in a post on X, “aim to try this in late July!” in response to a video of an animated Super Heavy booster catch.
As for when the next Starship launch will take place, on July 5, Musk said “four weeks” in a post on X. That timeline would put the launch around August 2, but the rocket billionaire’s estimates are often optimistically hopeful. So the earliest we might see Starship IFT-5 lift off is in early August.