CEO Elon Musk has revealed the first glimpse of the most complex, important, and unproven part of Starship’s record-breaking Super Heavy booster. Known as the engine section, the aft end of Super Heavy is likely where the fate of early booster prototypes will lie. For the most part, Super Heavy is just a colossal duo…
Spaceflight Now reports that SpaceX has scheduled Starlink’s West Coast launch debut no earlier than August 10th, a mission that will also mark the company’s first launch in almost six weeks. SpaceX completed its latest Falcon 9 launch – and 20th launch of 2021 – on June 30th, successfully deploying dozens of customer small satellites and…
SpaceX says its Hawthorne, California rocket factory and headquarters has completed the assembly of Starship and Super Heavy’s 100th Raptor engine. SpaceX began developing Raptor behind the scenes as far back as 2012 and 2013, when a small team successfully tested a full-scale Raptor preburner – a small but important subcomponent – at NASA’s Stennis…
A week after Germany was hit by devastating floods that released two months’ worth of rainfall in just two days, several areas of the country remain severely hobbled by the effects of the natural disaster. Rescue operations are still underway, but in locations such as Rhineland-Palatinate, communication remains difficult due to limited cellular reception and…
For at least the fourth time in 2021, SpaceX has shipped a new Falcon booster from its Hawthorne, California headquarters and factory to an expansive test and development campus in Central Texas. By all appearances, SpaceX’s latest delivery could imply that the company is on track to experience its first Falcon booster production uptick in…
More than six years after New Shepard’s first test flight and nine years after a pad abort featuring a prototype of the rocket’s capsule, Blue Origin has launched its first crew of suborbital tourists. Almost exclusively funded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ stock sales over more than 21 years of operations, Blue Origin has been…
SpaceX has begun rapidly assembling the first orbital Starship prototype and the Super Heavy booster set to launch it isn’t far behind. SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas rocket factory seemingly turned a corner in early July as sections of Starship 20 (S20) began to pop up around the site. Though parts labeled Starship “SN20” first appeared…
CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX has plans to build the “most advanced rocket engine factory in the world” in Central Texas to support the growing needs of Starship and Super Heavy. If all goes according to plan, that facility could also become the highest-output rocket factory ever built, churning out hundreds of Raptor engines…
CEO Elon Musk has released the first official video of A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), the newest member of SpaceX’s fleet of ‘autonomous spaceport drone ships’. Purely from a visual perspective, drone ship ASOG represents a substantial departure from older siblings Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) and Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY). Whereas…
SpaceX has installed a Raptor engine on a Super Heavy booster prototype for the first time, defying expectations and setting the rocket up for two major tests as early as this week. On Thursday, July 8th, SpaceX briefly filled Super Heavy Booster 3’s (B3) propellant tanks with benign nitrogen gas. The vehicle seemingly came to…