Elon Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX performed a static fire test on its Starship rocket booster Super Heavy prototype. This is the first static fire test on any Super Heavy rocket booster prototype. This specific prototype of Super Heavy is referred to as Booster 3, the first one to ever roll to the company’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
This first static fire of a Super Heavy booster was carried out with only 3 Raptor engines installed. SpaceX aims to increase the Raptor engine count on the Super Heavy rocket to 32 later this year as Elon Musk previously said.
SpaceX released an astonishing picture of the 1st Super Heavy static fire that shows the massiveness of this ultra-large rocket booster. The height of Super Heavy is 72 meters, coupled with the Starship on top, it becomes a 124 meters tall megastructure, 13 meters taller than the mighty Saturn V that stood at 111 meters tall (more info and infographic).
After this Booster 3 static fire, SpaceX is preparing for another static fire test on the Booster 4 prototype. If the Booster 4 static fire is a success, SpaceX will try to test the current Booster 3 with 9 engines, Elon Musk revealed on Twitter.
Not only Starship combined with Super Heavy will be the biggest rocket humanity has ever seen but more importantly, it will be a reusable booster as well. “But, much more important, is that this *design* is capable of full & rapid reusability,” Musk stressed the reusability of the Super Heavy in one of his tweets yesterday, “Long way to go from design to making it actually fully & rapidly reusable with high payload, but at least success is *one* of the possible outcomes haha,” Elon Musk further stated.
Local observers like Mary from the Boca Chica village and the robot cameras installed by NasaSpaceFlight.com captured the first Super Heavy static fire test from multiple angles and compiled them all in the following video.
