According to a recent post on
Part of the Starship rocket, which includes the upper stage spacecraft Ship, the Super Heavy is the most powerful booster ever built and has flown eleven times to date with varying degrees of success.
SpaceX just launched the new rocket called Booster 19 for pre-flight testing and shared some video clips captured by a drone on Sunday. You can view the footage by selecting the image at the top left of the post below.
The third version of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster is 124.4 meters tall, just over a meter taller than its predecessor.
For the first time, it features Raptor 3 engines instead of Raptor 2 engines, with improvements such as higher thrust and better efficiency.
The new missile design also helps increase the ship’s payload capacity by approximately 40 tons, bringing it to over 100 tons for missions that can recover both the Super Heavy and the ship.
Version 3 also features new docking adapters for the important in-orbit fuel transfer process, which will allow the ship to continue to other celestial bodies such as the Moon and even Mars.
Notably, the 12th Starship flight will be the first to launch from SpaceX’s newly built Pad 2 at its Starbase location in Boca Chica, Texas. So far, all flights have taken off from Pad 1, which is currently being renovated. SpaceX also plans to begin launches later this year from a new launch site on Florida’s Space Coast to rapidly advance spacecraft testing.
SpaceX has not yet released a detailed flight plan for its upcoming Starship test, so we currently don’t know whether the Super Heavy will land back on base or on water. As for the ship, it’s likely that the upper stage will attempt another controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, although hopefully we’ll see SpaceX’s first attempt to return the ship to the Starbase sometime this year.
NASA is closely monitoring Starship’s progress and plans to use a modified version of the spacecraft to land two astronauts on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027, although that date could be pushed back.
