"In order to do this, you actually have to have vents, the super hot plasma from the upper stage engines has got to go somewhere. "There's a meaningful payload-to-orbit advantage with hot staging, that is conservatively about a 10 percent improvement if you basically just never stop thrusting," Musk said. SpaceX is building a variant of the Starship to serve as a lunar lander in NASA's Artemis program. The Starship then would separate and ignite its own engines to continue on to orbit. The original design called for the Super Heavy's engines to shut down after boosting the Starship out of the lower atmosphere. The reusable Super Heavy first stage is equipped with 33 methane-powered Raptor engines, while the Starship second stage features six.
The fully-reusable two-stage rocket is the most powerful in the world.
It depends on how well we do at stage separation." A SpaceX Super Heavy booster (silver) Starship upper stage (black) are seen atop their firing stand at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, flight test facility. In a Twitter Spaces discussion with author Ashlee Vance, Musk said SpaceX is implementing "well over a thousand" changes," and "I think the probability of this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. That's assuming the Federal Aviation Administration allows clearance to fly in the wake of the Super Heavy's dramatic maiden launch April 20, in which the rocket blew itself up after multiple engine failures and the Starship upper stage failed to separate from the first stage booster. SpaceX will need another six weeks or so to finish implementing hundreds of changes to its Super Heavy/Starship rocket and the gargantuan booster's Texas launch pad before it will be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit, company founder Elon Musk said Saturday.
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