SpaceX Successfully Test-Fires ‘Starship’

America’s Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) marks a successful firing test of the engines on the most powerful rocket, ‘Starship’ specially designed for astronauts to march on the Moon and Mars on Thursday.

The test at the company’s private space base in Texas called a static fire, of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of SpaceX’s Starship and is likely to set a new record for the force ever produced by a single space rocket.

The test was live-streamed and the firing was of roughly 10 seconds, the company's chief executive, Elon Musk, tweeted shortly after the test.

Musk said that the 31 engines fired overall, as one engine was turned off just before the test and the other stopped itself.

 According to NASA Spaceflight communication team, the 31 Raptor engines have set a new record for the most thrust ever produced by a single rocket, roughly 17 million pounds in comparison with 10.5 million pounds for the Russian N1, and 8 million pounds for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

It added the Super heavy’s 33 engines at the first stage itself will surpass the thrust of the Saturn V, the storied NASA rocket that sent humans to the moon during the Apollo program of the 1960s and '70s.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s, ‘Starship’ is funded partially by a USD 3 billion contract from NASA, which plans to use the SpaceX rocket in the upcoming years to land the first crew of astronauts on the moon after a decades-long waiting since 1972, as part of the U.S. space agency's multibillion-dollar Artemis program.