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By next year, we may get to see a pair of the world's largest spacecraft work in tandem in a spectacular attempt to refuel one of them in orbit, serving as a crucial milestone towards demonstrating thatAccording to Chojnacki, the watershed test, which will span several weeks, is scheduled to begin March 2025, and will wrap up that summer — although there have been no official announcements on this from either NASA or SpaceX.
Weeks later, the second "chaser" rocket will fly up for a rendezvous with its companion, after which the two Starships will dock with each other. Then the latecomer will transfer propellant to the first rocket, and once it's topped it off, undock. From there, both will deorbit. This would mark the first time that ship-to-ship propellant transfer is demonstrated at this scale, according to Chojnacki.
"And once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," he said in the interview. "If you can have a Starship with propellant aggregation, that's going to be the next step to doing an uncrewed demonstration.
That proved that Starship was well on its way to being the reusable launch platform as promised. Next up, SpaceX plans to demonstrate that the vehicle's upper stage, the Starship itself, can relight one of its rocket engines in space — which will be essential for the spacecraft to perform controlled reentries into the Earth's atmosphere in the future.
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