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Spacex has Fired Starship's Raptor Engine and the Vehicle Still Stands

posted by martyb on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the You're-fired!-YAY! dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the first-time, a full-scale prototype of SpaceX's Starship vehicle lit its engine on Tuesday evening. After ignition, it appeared that the Raptor rocket engine burned for about 4 seconds. At the end of this test at the South Texas Launch Site, the vehicle still stood. About 90 minutes after the test, SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk confirmed the test firing was good, saying, "Starship SN4 passed static fire."

Tuesday night's test, which took place at 8:57pm CT local time in Texas (01:57 UTC Wednesday), occurred eight days after a successful pressurization test of this Starship prototype, known as SN4. Engineers will now review the data before possibly performing another static fire test, or a small hop. Ultimately, if this vehicle survives additional testing, it may make a 150-meter hop above the scrubby Texas lowlands.

This test also took place less than a week after NASA awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract to develop Starship as a Lunar Lander—a vehicle for carrying cargo and crew from lunar orbit down to the surface, and back. Although Starship is the most ambitious of three landers NASA is considering as part of its Artemis Program, it is also the only one actively testing full-scale prototypes.

[...] As part of its fast, iterative design process, SpaceX has already stacked SN5, the next Starship prototype. It could very well fly higher than SN4, providing SpaceX engineers ever more data as they seek to understand their new, powerful rocketship.

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2020, @07:19AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2020, @07:19AM (#991254)

    Spacex has Fired Starship's Raptor Engine and the Vehicle Still Stands

    There [youtu.be]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @01:53AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @01:53AM (#991510)

      No rapid disassembly.

  • (Score: 2) by corey on Thursday May 07 2020, @10:50AM (3 children)

    by corey (2202) on Thursday May 07 2020, @10:50AM (#991272)

    I took a look at the Twitter video and suddenly my phone blasted out the audio of some dudes creaming their pants laughing and carrying on about how it fired, including how it blocked out the lights.

    Why are all SpaceX videos filled with all these cheering tweens going mental when launch is successful? Then the commentator is as boring as bat shit. The NASA videos always have engaging and entertaining commentators like Jack King or the classic George Diller. Always so cool and calm. And no background hysterics. They seem so pro by comparison.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2020, @12:22PM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) on Thursday May 07 2020, @12:22PM (#991281) Journal

      They seem so pro by comparison.

      Great production values, but what's NASA doing these days?

      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:21PM (1 child)

        by Immerman (3985) on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:21PM (#991331)

        Strange isn't it? It's almost like having a big team of young, passionate people working on a game-changing project with minimal bureaucracy is more productive than a bunch of old men struggling to provide incremental advances under the weight of an immense government bureaucracy.

        But that can't possibly be right...

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