At the beginning of February, the upcoming V3 powerplant successfully passed pressure tests. After being moved to the launch pad, SpaceX planned to fire 10 engines at full power. But right after power-up, due to an automatic abort of the ground systems, a forced shutdown was ordered. This ended up hurting half of the Raptors.
Then, in mid-April, the company moved this booster with a full complement of 33 engines to the launch pad for another static fire test. This time, a ground-side sensor reported a problem with the pressure in the manifolds, which distribute propellant to the vehicle. This may have been a false reading, but it ended the test early, just 1.88 seconds after power-up.
The company finally successfully completed a full duration static fire test at the beginning of May.
“This is such a wild ride,” Jenna Lowe, Starship’s senior operations manager, said in the new video. “The highs are high. The lows are low.”
The new rocket
In many ways, this is a completely new rocket. It incorporates hundreds of lessons learned from V1 and V2 of the vehicle and seeks to improve overall performance, reliability and robustness. This is the vehicle that should hopefully allow SpaceX to begin deploying large Starlink satellites into orbit and demonstrate in-space refueling, which is critical to NASA’s Artemis Moon goals.
For the reinforcement stage, the changes start from the bottom and continue to the top.
SpaceX says that for this third version of the Raptor rocket engine, it has reduced the mass from 1,630 kg to 1,525 kg and that the overall mass savings at the vehicle level are almost 1 ton per engine through simplification of the engine itself, vehicle-side products and supporting hardware. The entire fuel transfer system has been redesigned. This should be more reliable and will allow simultaneous startup of all Raptors.
