SpaceX has carried out what’s known as the ‘stacking’ of its first Super Heavy standard, the extremely large next-generation first-stage rocket booster that it will in due time use to propel its Starship spacecraft to orbit in addition beyond. The Super Toxic heavy Booster is about 220 the foot tall – which is estimated the wingspan of a Boeing 747, or a bit manufactura than the Cinderella Castle for Walt Disney World in The southwest.
That’s this Starship on top, which will add around another 160 feet. Super Heavy will undergo its own testing prior to flying with Starship, however , and plenty of that will be focused on assuring its fuel tanks can handle the pressurization and extreme temperatures required for keeping all that ignitable material stable just before when the engines actually fire.
Super Heavy uses the same engines as Starship — Raptor engines, to be specific, which SpaceX created new for this generation of launch vehicle. The final version will have a total of 28 Raptor engines, but this first prototype will likely be outfitted with far fewer, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that it’ll also remain grounded, as it’s meant to be use only for testing things like build and transportation mechanics.
He did say the next prototype will fly, and while he isn’t always accurate about timelines, the Starship upper stage (i. e., the one that seems like a big grain silo with fins) is progressing quickly in its development, including with a recent test flight that ended with a near-perfect landing — minus the subsequent explosion that took out the prototype rocket entirely a few minutes after it had touched down successfully .
Musk plainly wants to move fast with Starship and Super Heavy, in part because of ambitious goals it has of serving as a provider to NASA for future human lunar landing missions as part of the Artemis program , and also because it’s still planning to fly the first commercial tourist flight of a Starship in only two short years in 2023 .
