SpaceX is gearing up for the ninth test flight of its Starship megarocket, which will be the first mission to reuse the vehicle’s Super Heavy first stage.
The company performed a static-fire test today (April 3) at its Starbase site in South Texas, briefly igniting a Super Heavy ‘s 33 Raptor engines while the giant booster remained anchored to the launch mount.
And it wasn’t the first rodeo for this particular rocket.
“Static fire of the Super Heavy preparing to launch Starship’s ninth flight test. This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7, and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight proven,” SpaceX wrote in an X post today that shared video of the test.
Related: Watch SpaceX Starship explode over Atlantic Ocean on Flight Test 7 (videos)
Flight 7, which launched on Jan. 16, was partially successful. Super Heavy came back to Starbase , where it was caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. But Starship’s 171-foot-tall (52-meter) upper stage exploded less than 10 minutes after liftoff, raining debris down on the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The same thing happened on Flight 8 , which lifted off on March 6 — another chopsticks catch of Super Heavy, another detonation above the Atlantic Ocean for the upper stage.
On both missions, the upper stage — which SpaceX calls Starship, or simply Ship — was supposed to make a soft splashdown off the coast of Western Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff.
Flight 9 will be the first Starship mission to employ a used Super Heavy booster. (Image credit: SpaceX)
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Both of its stages are designed to be fully reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other feats economically feasible.
None of Starship’s eight test missions to date have reused a Super Heavy or a Ship upper stage, so Flight 9 will be groundbreaking. SpaceX has not yet announced a target launch date for the mission.
