SpaceX
Flight 3 Starship is now fully stacked on Super Heavy Booster
SpaceX on Sunday fully stacked Flight 3 Starship spacecraft over the Super Heavy Booster rocket on the orbital launch pad at Starbase. Earlier, the space exploration company shared visuals of the Flight 3 Starship and booster and saved this update for later on.
NASASpaceflight on the other hand published a live feed of the stacking procedure. Since then, the images of the full stack have been appearing on social media site X, showing the preparations for the next Starship test.
Aside from this short clip, you can check the full livestream video on NSF’s YouTube channel linked in the post below.
Not completely aligned yet, some tweaking to go, but we’re pretty much at full stack with Booster 10 and Ship 28.
➡️https://t.co/TLYJRvN1Xd pic.twitter.com/S6E60CqeU7
— Chris Bergin – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) February 11, 2024
Flight 3:
SpaceX fired the Starship flight for the first time in April last year, the second flight followed in November. These two flight tests have achieved two key milestones including successful liftoff and hot-staging.
Starship Flight 3 Fully Stacked (Credit – Starship Gazer/X)
The third flight aims high at the orbit, If achieved, SpaceX will also have a shot at testing further maneuvers with this mega-rocket system.
Starship consists of two stages, the first stage is a super heavy rocket booster and the second stage is the Starship spacecraft. Starship can carry up to 150 metric tonnes of fully reusable and 250 metric tonnes of expendable payload.
During the first flight, its massive thrust damaged the launch pad. Since then, there have been some new improvements made to the launch ground to support the launch site.
More than 60 changes were also suggested by the FAA before the second flight test and it helped the flight to reach the upper atmosphere before blasting.
Ahead of the final launch, SpaceX could now perform hot-fire and other pre-flight tests. For now, there’s no exact date to fly the Starship test flight 3.