The private space firm rolled its Starship prototype, Ship 25, out to a suborbital pad ahead of a key pre-launch engine test.
SpaceX rolled Ship 25 out to a suborbital pad at Starbase in the morning on Thursday, May 18. The space company announcedthat it will perform a "static fire" test on the upper-stage prototype, during which it will fire its six Raptor engines without taking flight.
The 165-foot-tall upper stage is stacked onto SpaceX's Super Heavy prototype to make up the entire Starship launch system. When fully stacked, Starship is the largest rocket ever built, standing at 394 feet tall .It is also the world's most powerful rocket, producing 17 million lbs of thrust at launch thanks to the 33 Raptor engines attached to the Super Heavy first stage.
The initial plan was to send Ship 24 on almost an entire orbit of Earth, after which it was supposed to fly into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. The test flight didn't quite go as planned, as Booster 7 and Ship 24 failed to detach and SpaceX was forced to trigger theStarship liftoff in slow motion
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