SpaceX

Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) manufactures, launches, and communicates with satellites. Elon Musk founded it in 2002 to lower space transportation costs to colonise Mars.

 The company makes Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon spacecraft, rocket engines, and Starlink communications satellites.

SpaceX's Starlink satellite system will deliver commercial internet connectivity. The Starlink constellation, launched in January 2020, has approximately 3,300 tiny satellites in orbit.

The business is developing Starship, a privately funded, reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle for interplanetary and orbital spaceflight. 

Once operational, it will replace SpaceX's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon orbital vehicles. After receiving a launch licence, it will launch in early 2023 with the highest orbital rocket payload.

SpaceX has multiple space exploration accomplishments. These include the first privately developed liquid-propellant rocket that reached orbit, the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, the first to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, the first to achieve vertical propulsive landing of an orbital rocket booster, the first to reuse such a booster, and the first to send astronauts to orbit and the ISS. 

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets have launched and landed over 100 times.

SpaceX tests Starship booster for first orbital launch

SpaceX's Super Heavy booster, one-half of the company's Starship rocket system, momentarily roared to life for the first time on Thursday as part of a test-firing that brings the massive moon and Mars vehicle closer to its first orbital mission in the coming months.

Immediately following the live-streamed test, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that 31 of the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor rocket engines ignited for around 10 seconds at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, site.

According to a tweet from Musk, "Team shut off 1 engine right before start & 1 stopped itself, so 31 engines fired overall." But there are still enough engines to enter orbit.

The 23-story rocket remained vertically atop a platform next to a launch tower as the engines fired amid a boom of orange flames and billowing clouds of gas.

The cornerstone of Musk's plans to someday inhabit Mars, the vehicle will be linked to its upper-stage Starship spacecraft and reach heights of 394 feet (120 metres), surpassing the Statue of Liberty. However, the plans call for it to first take the lead in NASA's revived lunar exploration programme.

Before attempting to launch the powerful, next-generation rocket for the first time in an unmanned space mission, it was unknown whether SpaceX will chose to undertake another static-fire test of the Super Heavy with all 33 engines.

According to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, that launch, a test mission that would take off from Texas and land off the coast of Hawaii, might occur "in the next month or so," albeit the precise flight date depended on the results of Thursday's static fire test.

Also Read: Elon Musk's SpaceX will enable direct smartphone connections to Starlink broadband.

Shotwell reminded him that this first flight was really only a test. The ultimate goal is to avoid blowing up the launch pad; that is a success.

A Super Heavy booster's engine part exploded in flames during a previous test explosion in July 2022. 

Before that, SpaceX had tested the ability of its rocket to land by launching the top half of Starship in a series of "hop" flights to a height of around 6 miles. Everybody but one crashed.

According to Livestream commentators for the space media organisation NASA Spaceflight, Thursday's test-firing of the 31 Raptor engines appeared to set a new record for the most thrust ever produced by a single rocket - roughly 17 million pounds as opposed to 10.5 million pounds for the Russian N1 and 8 million pounds for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

They said it also represented the simultaneous firing of more rocket engines than the N1's 30.

The thrust from the first stage of the Saturn V, the illustrious NASA rocket that launched people to the moon during the Apollo programme in the 1960s and 1970s, will also be far outclassed by Super Heavy's 33 engines.

As part of NASA's multibillion-dollar Artemis programme, which will employ the SpaceX rocket to launch the first crew of people to the moon since 1972, Starship's development is partially supported by a $3 billion contract from NASA.