by SpaceX fueled a fully stacked Starship vehicle for the first time on Monday (Jan. 23), and dramatic photos are preserving the process for posterity.
The 395-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship is an icy white in the new photos, which SpaceX released via Twitter (opens in new tab) on Tuesday (January 24).
That’s a dramatic color shift for the silvery Starship, caused by loading more than 10 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellant into the stainless-steel vehicle’s tanks.
Video: SpaceX ignites multiple engines on the Starship Super Heavy booster for the first time
The refueling was part of a historic “wet dress rehearsal” that SpaceX conducted Monday at its South Texas Starbase facility.
During wet dress rehearsals, mission teams practice many of the procedures they will perform on launch day. Monday’s test will help SpaceX prepare for a very important Starship launch — the vehicle’s first-ever orbital test flight, which company founder and CEO Elon Musk said could take place as early as next month.
But this Starship vehicle, which consists of a first-stage prototype called Booster 7 and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Ship 24, still needs to pass a few more tests before embarking on that milestone flight, as SpaceX explained.
“After completing Starship’s first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal, Ship 24 will destack from Booster 7 in preparation for a static fire from Booster’s 33 Raptor engines,” the company said in a statement. another tweet on Tuesday (opens in new tab).
Static fires are another common prelaunch test, briefly igniting engines while a vehicle remains anchored to the ground. To date, Booster 7 has statically fired up to 14 of its 33 Raptors at one time. Ship 24 lit up all six of its Raptors last September.
SpaceX has big plans for Starship. For example, Musk believes the giant craft could soon make a settlement on Mars economically viable. And he has said that Starship will eventually perform most if not all of SpaceX’s spaceflight tasks.
NASA also invests in Starship. For example, the agency chose the vehicle as the first manned lander for its Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on and around the moon by the late 2020s. If all goes according to plan, a Starship will land astronauts near the moon’s south pole for the first time in 2025 or thereabouts.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
