Watch SpaceX fire up Starship spacecraft engines ahead of 7th test flight

Trevor Mogg

Published December 15, 2024 5:25 PM

SpaceX has shared a video (below) showing a static fire test of its Starship spacecraft at the spaceflight company’s Starbase site near Boca Chica, Texas.

Static fire of Flight 7 Starship pic.twitter.com/3Xa2bYFkdp

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 15, 2024

It comes a week after the Elon Musk-led spaceflight company tested the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster ahead of the seventh test flight involving the integrated booster and spacecraft, collectively known as the Starship rocket.

The footage, shared on Sunday, shows the Starship firmly secured to the ground as SpaceX fires three of the spacecraft’s six engines for about 8 seconds. Once the test data has been analyzed and the spacecraft deemed fit to fly, engineers will place the vehicle atop the 70-meter-tall Super Heavy booster ahead of the seventh orbital test flight.

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The Starship spacecraft has three Raptor engines designed for operation at sea level and three Raptor Vacuum engines optimized for use in the vacuum of space.

The Starship will use its engines for landing burns on both Earth and other celestial bodies, as well as for launches from locations where it lands other than Earth. In the seventh test flight, the spacecraft’s engines will ignite in orbit, and also again as the vehicle returns to Earth for a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Looking ahead, SpaceX is building a modified version of the Starship spacecraft that will land the first NASA crew on the moon in more than 50 years. The mission, Artemis III, was recently pushed back by at least a year to 2027. The Starship could also be used by NASA for the first crewed mission to Mars, which may take place sometime in the 2030s.

Before that, SpaceX is continuing with its testing of the entire Starship, the most powerful rocket ever to fly. The mighty machine, which has a total height of 120 meters, has already performed six test flights, with the more recent ones sending the Starship spacecraft to orbit.

No target date has been officially announced for the seventh test, but an email sent by NASA to the Federal Aviation Administration cites January 11 as the current target date for the flight.

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Space station crew had an amazing stroke of luck during Starship launch

The sixth Starship mission captured from the ISS. NASA / Don Pettit

NASA astronaut and current space station inhabitant Don Pettit seems to have the luck of the stars. During SpaceX’s sixth test flight of its massive Starship rocket from Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday, the International Space Station (ISS) just happened to be passing directly above — some 250 miles above, to be precise — giving keen photographer Pettit the perfect opportunity to capture the Starship’s launch.

SpaceX images show the awesome power of Starship’s Raptor engines

SpaceX has posted some incredible images showing the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines as they powered the Starship rocket skyward at the start of the vehicle’s sixth test flight on Tuesday.

“[Thirty-three] Raptor engines powering the Super Heavy booster off the pad from Starbase,” SpaceX wrote in the message on X.

Why was a piece of fruit floating inside Starship on its sixth test flight?

Anyone who watched SpaceX’s sixth test flight of its mighty Starship rocket on Tuesday will have noticed the odd sight of a banana — albeit a fake one — floating in the hold of the spacecraft as it sailed above Earth on its way from the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, to splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

No, this wasn’t placed there by a sneaky SpaceX engineer as joke. Rather, the full-size, toy banana acted as a zero-gravity indicator so that the mission team could confirm when the vehicle had reached microgravity conditions high above Earth.

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