The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built is about to get even larger.
On Monday (Oct. 13), SpaceX launched the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, sending the 403-foot-tall (124 meters) vehicle aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas.
The suborbital flight was a complete success. Both of Starship‘s elements — its Super Heavy booster and Starship (or “Ship” for short) upper stage — came back to Earth for pinpoint splashdowns. Ship also managed to relight one of its engines in space and deploy eight dummy payloads.
Flight 11 was a big moment for the Starship program, and not just because everything went so well. It was also a swan song, the final liftoff of the vehicle’s “Version 2” variant.
“Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 wrap-up post.
“This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond,” the company added.
That next iteration is Starship Version 3, which will be about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than its predecessor. V3 will look a lot like V2, but there will be big differences “under the hood,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the Flight 11 launch webcast on Monday.
For example, the V3 Ship’s propulsion system has been overhauled to accommodate Raptor 3, a new, brawnier version of the engine that powers both of Starship’s stages. (Super Heavy has 33 Raptors and Ship has six.)
“We’re also getting energy storage upgrades, tons of avionics changes — a lot of things that will enable longer-duration missions,” Huot said.
“One notable thing you’ll start seeing on the outside are these new docking adapters, which we’ll use when we bring two Starships together for propellant transfer,” he added. “That’s a core capability of Starship that we’re going to demonstrate next year.”
Indeed, in-space fuel transfer is a crucial part of any Starship deep-space mission. Ship upper stages bound for the moon or Mars will launch with a minimum amount of propellant onboard (to save mass for payloads) and will therefore need to meet up with multiple “tanker” ships in Earth orbit to fuel up.
The V3 Super Heavy, meanwhile, features a redesigned fuel transfer tube, a giant metallic structure that channels cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen down to the booster’s Raptor engines.
“New boosters are also going to have an integrated hot stage, a lot more vent area, and it’s designed to be fully reusable,” Huot said. (The hot stage marks the junction of Super Heavy and Ship; the “hot” part refers to the fact that Ship begins firing its engines before it has fully separated from the booster.)
The V3 Super Heavy will also have just three grid fins — the waffle-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for pinpoint touchdowns — instead of V2’s four.
“They’re 50% larger, though — much higher strength,” Huot said. “They’re also going to get used for vehicle lift and catch.”
The lifting and catching will be done by the Starship launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. These arms lift Ship and Super Heavy onto the launch mount, and they’ll also catch both vehicles when they come back home after liftoff. (SpaceX has performed three such chopstick catches with Super Heavy to date but has not yet tried it with Ship.)
All 11 Starship test flights have lifted off from Starbase’s Orbital Launch Mount 1. That pad will go on hiatus for a spell, however, as it’s overhauled to accommodate Starship V3.
“Among many other things, we’re installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system and upgrading the chopsticks for future catches,” Jake Berkowitz, a SpaceX lead propulsion engineer, said during Monday’s launch webcast. “So until that’s complete, we’ll be running launches from Pad 2, which will be online very soon.”
Starship V3 will be capable of flying to Mars and may well do so next year, if testing continues to go well: SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company would like to launch a small fleet of uncrewed Starships to the Red Planet during the next opportunity, which comes in late 2026. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)
Over the long haul, however, SpaceX plans to rely on an even bigger and more powerful Starship — one that stands a whopping 466 feet (142 m) tall and sports 42 Raptors instead of the current 39. This V4 iteration is expected to debut in 2027, Musk has said.
2027 could be a landmark year, for both SpaceX and NASA. It’s when the agency aims to launch its Artemis 3 mission, which will land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. The lunar lander for that epic mission will be a Starship upper stage.
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