SpaceX fueled a fully stacked Starship vehicle for the first time on Monday (Jan. 23), and dramatic photos preserve the process for generations to come.
In the new photos, the 395-foot-long (120-meter) Starship is an icy white, which SpaceX posted via twitter (opens in new tab) on Tuesday (January 24).
It’s a dramatic color change for the silver Starship, brought about by loading more than 10 million pounds (450,000 kg) of supercooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant into the stainless steel vehicle’s tanks.
video: SpaceX ignites multiple engines on Starship Super Heavy booster for first time
The fueling was part of a landmark “wet dress rehearsal” that SpaceX performed Monday at its Starbase facility in South Texas.
During wet dress rehearsal, mission crews practice many of the procedures they will perform on launch day. Monday’s test will help SpaceX prepare for a very important Starship liftoff — the vehicle’s first orbital test flight, which company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said could happen as early as next month.
But this Starship vehicle, which includes a first-stage prototype called Booster 7 and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Ship 24, must pass a few more tests before it can begin flying to that milestone. As SpaceX explained.
“After completing Starship’s first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal, Ship 24 will be separated from Booster 7 to prepare for a steady fire of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines,” the company said. another tuesday tweet (opens in new tab),
Another common prelaunch test is the static fire, in which the engines are briefly ignited while a vehicle is stationary on the ground. To date, Booster 7 has static-fired a maximum of 14 of its 33 Raptors simultaneously. Ship 24 illuminated all six of its Raptors last September.
SpaceX has big plans for Starship. Musk believes, for example, that the giant vehicle could soon make a Mars settlement economically viable. And he has said that Starship will eventually take over most, if not all, of SpaceX’s spaceflight duties.
NASA has also invested in Starship. For example, the agency selected the vehicle as the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent, permanent presence on and around the Moon by the late 2020s. A Starship will land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole for the first time in 2025 or later, if all goes according to plan.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaelwall (opens in new tab), Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab),