Preparations for the first flight of the Starship continue. Engineers need to conduct numerous tests of their boosters before they can send a spacecraft into space. Over the weekend, SpaceX tested the engines of the Starship, which will sit atop the powerful Super Heavy rocket when it makes its first orbital flight in the coming months.
Usually, the videos of such tests are shot in angles that are not very good for specialists. But SpaceX approached such a test in a creative way. The team placed the camera directly above the Starship to capture amazing footage for six seconds as the engines turned on, which can then be used in various promotional videos. And they succeeded — this process looks incredibly spectacular.
To get this angle, the camera was probably attached to a quadcopter hovering over the rocket, though SpaceX does not confirm this. The company also posted a video from a normal angle, so you can see the test from a different angle than it is normally seen from Earth.
A few months ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also released a pair of equally stunning footage showing a static test of seven of the Raptor Super Heavy 33 engines. Its thrust will be 7.8 tons, which is almost twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) mega-rocket, which made its first takeoff in November as part of the Artemis I lunar mission.
The Super Heavy and Starship, collectively known as Starship, will be used by NASA to ferry astronauts and supplies to the Moon, and could even be used for the first crewed mission to Mars, possibly in the 2030s.
We previously reported that the Starship test flight was scheduled to take place in December.
