SpaceX tests next Starship SuperHeavy Booster four days

The only date that has been talked about for the next Starship Integrated Test Flight, IFT-12, has been "March, 2026" but since it's the first test of Version 3 of the Super Heavy, the preparations it's going through are a bit more than another flight of Version 2 would get.

So it's not surprising that they took four days of test to fully ready everyone involved. There has been a lull in Starship testing, primarily because the first one they brought out to the Orbital Launch Mount had a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) back in November. The rocket’s liquid oxygen tank ruptured under pressure, and SpaceX scrapped the booster. This booster, 19, was up for testing at the Massey’s Test Site last week. 

SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: “Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey’s Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster’s propellant tanks on launch day.

Booster 19 appeared to sail through the thermal stress testing and SpaceX returned the booster to the factory early Monday (Feb 9). There, technicians will mount 33 Raptor engines to the bottom of the rocket and install the booster’s grid fins. Among the many changes to the SuperHeavy in the change to version (or block) 3 is replacing the four grid fins with three, and the hot-staging ring added earlier in the test campaign has been made into part of the first stage rather than effectively a separate stage that was dropped when the first stage was jettisoned. 

After receiving its engines and grid fins, the Super Heavy booster will roll out to the launch pad at Starbase. SpaceX’s launch team will fill it with methane and liquid oxygen for a test-firing of its 33 engines.

Meanwhile, the first of SpaceX’s upgraded Starship vehicles—essentially the upper stage that flies on top of the Super Heavy booster—will travel to the Massey’s Test Site for its own cryogenic proof test campaign. It is also expected to undergo a static fire test of its six Raptor engines.

While we don't have a tentative scheduled date, this set of tests didn't insert any delay and if the coming sets of tests go smoothly we should be looking at a test in four to six weeks - in other words, before the end of March. IFT-12 will, of course, be the 12th full-scale Starship/SuperHeavy test flight overall, and the mission will probably follow the same profile as previous flights; that is, launching around 7:30 PM Central time, with Starship arcing halfway around the world from South Texas to a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.  My calendar says DST starts on Sunday morning March 8th, so we'll almost certainly be on DST by the launch - as we were on flight 11's launch when we got to see the ship going over the southern tip of Florida, doing a bit of the "Space Jellyfish" phenomenon for us.

Starship isn't as far along as it was always intended to be by now - which shouldn't be news to you since it's in so many plain old news media stories. There's some inevitable attempt to rush things, but SpaceX wants to get to their orbital refueling missions and launching an uncrewed Starship to the moon. The days of Starship launches becoming regular should be approaching quickly.  

Vapors from the boil-off of cryogenic liquid nitrogen surround the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) Super Heavy booster over the February 7-8 weekend. Credit: SpaceX