Watch the 9th Starship Flight’s booster burning 33 Raptor engines up close as it leaves the launch pad

SpaceX has shared never-before-seen visuals from the 9th Starship flight test, showing the Super Heavy booster burning its Raptor engines and leaving the launch pad.

Starship is a super-large space launch vehicle consisting of two stages. The first stage is responsible for taking off from the pad and helping the upper stage to reach orbit.

Through the past eight flights, SpaceX has achieved new milestones for the super heavy. These include a successful launch, achieving higher engine burn efficiency, marking a hot-staging, boostback burn, and finally, a safe recovery via catch tower.

However, the booster has one more achievement left – full reusability. During Flight 5, SpaceX completed the first-ever booster catch and one of its Raptor engines was reused with Flight 7’s booster.

Starship Super Heavy booster liftoff (Source – SpaceX)

With Flight 9, the company reused Flight 7’s entire booster, featuring 29 out of the 33 flight-proven Rator engines. During the liftoff, the ship performed a full-duration ascent burn with 33 Raptor engines, followed by the first deterministic flip and boostback burn.

For this flight, SpaceX did not attempt a booster recovery due to the numerous experiments to improve its design and flight capabilities of future hardware.

On its way back to Earth, the booster demonstrated flight at a higher angle of attack. By increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the rocket, a higher angle of attack results in a slower descent speed, which in turn requires less propellant for the initial landing burn.

Since SpaceX had no plans to recover the booster, its default landing trajectory was set to the Gulf of America. The first stage approached the landing area in the Gulf of America and fired 13 center and middle ring Raptor engines.

Soon after, the control center lost contact with the booster as soon as the landing burn began, which led to rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD).

Watch the 9th Starship Flight’s super heavy booster liftoff up close here.