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SpaceX fired 31 of the 33 engines on its Super Heavy Booster 7 during a roughly 10-second static-fire test at Starbase, Texas, on February 9, 2023. The booster stayed anchored at the pad: this was a ground test ahead of Starship’s first orbital flight attempt, not a launch.
What happened in the 31-engine test?
SpaceX tested Super Heavy Booster 7, the first stage of its Starship launch system, at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas. The Associated Press reported that the engines fired for about 10 seconds. The planned test involved all 33 Raptor engines, but 31 ignited.
Elon Musk explained the two exceptions in a post quoted by Futurism and the Associated Press: “Team turned off 1 engine just before start & 1 stopped itself, so 31 engines fired overall,” followed by “But still enough engines to reach orbit!”
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A static fire is an engine test performed while the rocket is held in place. In this case, Super Heavy remained secured at the pad as its engines fired. The test let SpaceX operate a large cluster of booster engines together without sending the vehicle into flight.
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That distinction matters: the February 9 test was not Starship’s orbital flight, and the firing by itself did not establish that the vehicle was ready for a full mission.
Why was firing 31 engines significant?
The firing was a major ground milestone in preparation for Starship’s first orbital flight attempt. Operating 31 engines at once exercised a large part of the booster’s engine cluster under test conditions. Before the test, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell described the planned full static fire as “really the final ground test that we can do before we light ‘em up and go,” according to Spaceflight Now, which attributed the remark to SpaceNews. Her statement referred to the planned test, not to an assessment made after the 31-engine firing.
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How much thrust did the test produce?
Futurism relayed an early, back-of-the-envelope estimate by Stephen Clark of NASASpaceFlight that the 31-engine firing produced more than 15 million pounds of thrust. That figure was an estimate, not a SpaceX-published measurement of the test.
The Associated Press separately described the vehicle as capable of about 17 million pounds of liftoff thrust. That is a figure for the vehicle’s full capability in AP’s account; it should not be confused with the estimated output of this particular test.
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What the milestone did—and did not—show
- It showed: 31 of Super Heavy Booster 7’s 33 engines ignited together in a ground test lasting about 10 seconds, according to the Associated Press.
- It did not show: Starship completing an orbital flight, or the vehicle being proven ready for flight based on this test alone.
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