The Biggest and Coolest Rocket Ever Is About to Get Bigger and Cooler

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If the New Space Race is essentially SpaceX versus the world, the company’s vital competitor continues to be… itself, as the upcoming Starship flight test is about to prove once again.

Tentatively set for Friday, Jan. 10, Starship Flight Test 7 will be the first to include the Block 2 version of the second-stage spaceship, which, the company says, includes a 25 percent increase in propellant volume (i.e., more go-juice) among several other improvements. They’re also testing new forward flaps (wave to Flappy!), new heat tiles, an active tile cooling system, and the test deployment of 10 Starlink V3 mockup satellites. And more.

It’s a ballsy move for Starship because while it was designed from the start to open up the inner solar system to human exploration and settlement, the Ship has yet to even make a single full orbit around the Earth.

And Another Thing: Starship nomenclature can be a little confusing. The first-stage booster is named Super Heavy. The second stage — the actual spaceship — is called Starship. But the entire stack is also called Starship. Oftentimes, you’ll see SpaceX personnel refer to the second stage as “the Ship” to kinda-sorta clear things up. So I’ll do that, too.

Previous test flights got the Ship into orbital velocity but made precision landings in the Indian Ocean before completing an orbit.

While there don’t appear to be any major (or even minor) improvements to Super Heavy this time around, that doesn’t mean SpaceX isn’t pushing any boundaries. Super Heavy Booster 14 will be the first to re-use a Raptor engine from a previous flight — a single Raptor from Booster 12 that flew in Flight Test 5 back in October. Super Heavy has up to 33 engines (!!!), and previous flight tests proved that it can lose several engines and still attain escape velocity, so the failure of a single re-used engine wouldn’t prove fatal. Mostly, what SpaceX is going to want is DATA about how the new Raptor engines perform on re-use.

Entire Falcon 9 rockets, powered by nine Merlin engines, have been re-used up to two dozen times, so it isn’t like SpaceX is starting from zero with Raptor.

Flight Test 7 is also the last one that SpaceX won’t attempt to catch the returning ship in Mechazilla’s tender embrace. If the company plans to make the catch at Starbase in Texas, they’ll need to get permission from Mexico before flying a big-a** spaceship at supersonic speeds through Mexican airspace. There’s also been talk about building a secondary Mechazilla in some sparsely inhabited bit of western Australia. The Aussies have already been cooperative, and, frankly, attempting the first Ship catch there seems a bit wiser than flying it over heavily populated parts of northern Mexico.

It’s no big deal to put up a “spare” Mechazilla because before they can start colonizing Mars, SpaceX has to build a LOT of Mechazillas. Musk’s rough calculation is that it will take thousands of Starship flights, with about 1,000 of those taking place in the two-month Earth-Mars flight window that opens every 26 months.

A thousand launches in 60 days. That’s about one launch every 90 minutes for eight weeks. Wait two years, then do it again. Lather, rinse, colonize.

It’s the most ambitious project in human history, and the next small step could take place as soon as Friday.

Space enthusiast and amateur astronomer Vikranth Jonna was kind enough to put together this handy infographic of all the various improvements being readied for Friday’s flight. You can check that out here.