The Evolution of the Flying Water Tower

SpaceX to launch the sixth test launch of Starship and Super Heavy on Tuesday

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

SpaceX will perform its sixth unmanned test flight of the Starship and Super Heavy booster on Tuesday, November 19th, no earlier than 4 PM CST.

The Super Heavy booster stands as the most powerful rocket in history. The current iteration uses 33 Raptor 2 engines that run on liquid methane and liquid oxygen and can produce 17 million pounds of thrust. In contrast, the Saturn V, which served as the main engine for the Apollo lunar missions, was only capable of producing 7.6 million pounds of thrust. Projections indicate that the Super Heavy can propel 165 tons into Earth's orbit.

Star Hopper, a stainless-steel water tower with a single Raptor 1 engine, served as the foundation for the Starship and Super Heavy booster program. The mission profile was a simple launch from a cement pad in Boca Chica, Texas; a climb to about 100 meters; and a landing at another nearby pad. Instead of using sterile facilities to produce rockets, SpaceX opted to use easily accessible materials and standard construction techniques. SpaceX often produces the rocket bodies in the open air of the Texas Gulf Coast, using rolled stainless steel.

As SpaceX continued to push the limits of construction, the transition from Star Hopper to Starship resulted in a series of spectacular crashes and explosions, leading to rapid unscheduled disassembly. Unlike Blue Origin's New Glenn or NASA's SLS, SpaceX publicly acknowledges their failures as part of their iterative process to create a functional rocket.

This week’s launch will be similar to the successful fifth test flight. The suborbital flight will have some hardware and software upgrades based on the results of the fifth flight. The flight profile will involve the booster's return to the launch site for tower capture, the relighting of a Starship's Raptor 2 engine in space, and the evaluation of several heatshield experiments.  

With all SpaceX experimental programs, it is guaranteed to be an exciting launch for us space fans!

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Starship and Super Heavy Test Launch