10.09.2025
SpaceX test fires next Super Heavy booster for Starship's 11th upcoming launch
The company is hoping to keep their momentum.
SpaceX conducts a static-fire test with the Flight 11 Starship Super Heavy B15 at its Starbase site in South Texas on Sept. 7, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)
With a rousing success under its belt from its last test flight, SpaceX is now preparing for the next launch of its giant Starship rocket.
The company performed a static test fire of the Super Heavy booster slated for Starship's 11th launch. Secured to the launch stand at SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility in Texas, the booster, B15, fired its 33 Raptor engines for about 10 seconds Sunday, Sept. 7, which was posted in videos on SpaceX's profile on X.
The test comes less than two weeks after Starship's Flight Test 10, which, for the first time, completed each of its objectives in a major win for SpaceX as they develop the rocket for operational missions.
Boosters are typically test fired in the days and weeks leading up to launches, and are part of final assessments to ensure vehicle safety ahead of liftoff. This test signals a quick turnaround for SpaceX as it prepares Starship for Flight Test 11.
SpaceX sought a similar cadence before Flight 10, but mishaps during Starship's upper stage testing for Ship 36 caused an explosion on the test stand during cryogenic fueling. The delay bumped Ship 37 up in the line, slating it to fly Starship's most successful flight to date.
Flight 10 lifted off from Starbase on Aug. 26. The stacked vehicle executed a successful hot-stage separation between Super Heavy and Ship, resulting in the booster's soft splashdown, and Ship's orbital insertion, payload deployment, atmospheric reentry and soft splashdown of its own in the Indian Ocean.
Flight 10's achievements were a significant step forward for the stalled program, and this weekend's B15 Super Heavy static fire engine test puts SpaceX on an pace to possibly launch Starship Flight Test 11 before the end of the month.
The test marked a welcome victory for SpaceX and the budding launch vehicle, which suffered in-flight upper stage explosions during each of this year's three Starship launches leading up to Flight 10. Those mishaps dealt a blow to SpaceX's development timeline for Starship, which has been promised to be operational in time for NASA's Artemis 3 moon mission.
Starship is contracted as Artemis 3's Human Landing System (HLS), tasked with landing the first astronauts on the moon since the final Apollo mission in 1972. NASA's new lunar program currently has Artemis 3 slated for 2027, but whether Starship will be ready in time is uncertain.
The launch vehicle was recently criticized by former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, during a Senate Committee hearing on Sept. 3, during which he cited Starship's several unfulfilled milestones left on its plate.
Starship can't get to the moon all on its own. By the time it gets to orbit, the vehicle will have exhausted too much fuel to make trip. To help it reach the moon, SpaceX is planning up to a dozen additional Starship launches to refuel the Artemis 3 lunar lander in orbit, but hasn't yet demonstrated transferring the cryogenic fuel between vehicles. In fact, no one has ever done that.
SpaceX also needs to successfully land Starship on the moon for an uncrewed demonstration mission before NASA will qualify the vehicle for astronauts.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 25.09.2025
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SpaceX fires up Starship spacecraft ahead of 11th test flight
Flight 11 could happen soon.
SpaceX is continuing to gear up for the next flight of its Starship megarocket, which may be just around the corner.
The company conducted a "static fire" test with its latest Starship upper stage recently, firing up its six Raptor engines while the vehicle remained anchored to the launch mount at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.
The milestone, which SpaceX announced via X on Monday evening (Sept. 22), is part of the prep work for Starship's 11th test flight. The company has already static-fired the Super Heavy first-stage booster that will fly on that mission.
SpaceX conducts a static fire test with the upper stage of its Flight 11 Starship vehicle at Starbase in South Texas. The company released this photo on X on Sept. 22, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle Mars and embark on other exploration tasks. Both of its elements — Super Heavy and the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship or simply "Ship" — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
Starship has flown in its stacked configuration 10 times to date, most recently on Aug. 26. That test launch was a success; both Super Heavy and Ship splashed down in their target zones (the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean, respectively), and Ship deployed eight dummy payloads into space as planned. That had never been done before on a Starship flight.
Flight 10 was a bounce-back mission for Starship; SpaceX had lost Ship prematurely on the previous three test flights, and another one of the upper-stage vehicles exploded on the test stand this past June.
SpaceX has not yet announced a target launch date for Flight 11, which will be the final mission of Starship's current "Version 2" iteration.
The company will soon start flying Starship Version 3, an even bigger vehicle that will be capable of getting cargo and people to Mars. If all goes well with the Version 3 test campaign, the first fleet of uncrewed Starships could launch toward the Red Planet in late 2026, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 1.10.2025
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SpaceX targeting Oct. 13 for next Starship megarocket launch
Flight 11 will be the last launch of Starship's current "Version 2" iteration.
SpaceX's Starship megarocket launches on its 10th-ever test flight, on Aug. 26, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX
SpaceX's Starship megarocket will fly again less than two weeks from now, if all goes according to plan.
SpaceX announced on Monday (Sept. 29) that it's targeting Oct. 13 for StarshipFlight 11, which will be the final launch of the vehicle's current "Version 2" iteration.
Liftoff will occur from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. The window on Oct. 13 will open at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT; 6:15 p.m. local Texas time), SpaceX wrote in an update on Monday. The company will webcast the action, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff.
SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk. The vehicle consists of two stainless-steel elements, both of which are designed to be fully reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short.
Starship Version 2 is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, towering nearly 400 feet (121 meters) above the ground when stacked. The next variant — Version 3, which will debut on Flight 12 — is larger still, at 408 feet (124.4 m) tall.
But the rocket will get even bigger over time, if all goes to plan: Version 4, which is expected to debut in 2027, is expected to be around 466 feet (142 m) tall.
Starship Flight 11 will be very similar to Flight 10, which lifted off on Aug. 26 and was a complete success.
On that most recent flight, Super Heavy steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned. Ship did the same in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia — but not before deploying eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites.
Flight 11 will target those same two splashdown zones, and Ship will aim to deploy another eight mock Starlinks, SpaceX wrote in Monday's update. And, as on Flight 10, SpaceX will remove some heat-shield tiles from Ship "to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle."
Super Heavy, meanwhile, will demonstrate "a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation Super Heavy." That plan calls for the booster to use five of its 33 Raptor engines to fine-tune its descent instead of the usual three, "adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns." The five-engine fine-tuning burn will be the baseline for Version 3 of Super Heavy, SpaceX wrote in the update.
And Flight 11 will be the second launch for this particular booster. It also completed Flight 8 this past March, coming back to Starbase for a catch by the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower — the planned recovery strategy for both Super Heavy and Ship on operational launches. Twenty-four of the Flight 11 Super Heavy's 33 Raptors are flight-proven, according to SpaceX.
This will be the second reuse of a Super Heavy. SpaceX also employed a flight-proven booster on Flight 9, which launched on May 27.
Quelle: SC