With the wreckage of SN10 still laying on the landing pad, SpaceX is already moving forward with the next Starship prototype ready for testing. SN10 improved greatly over the last two vehicles giving SN11 a much higher chance of survival.
Starship SN10 lifted off from Mount A at SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site last week and made amazing improvement over its previous generations by softly touching down vertically on the landing pad, before succumbing to its damages in a massive explosion. It seemed to only suffer from an early engine shut down and failure of the stand-in landing legs.
While no official reason has been given to what went wrong with SN10, SpaceX will take what happened and make changes to SN11 to give it a better shot at sticking the landing and keeping it that way.
The first steps in SN11’s test campaign took place yesterday when SpaceX brought it out of the high bay and transported it down Boca Chica Boulevard to Mount B at the launch site.
SpaceX has been getting more and more efficient with its activities down in Boca Chica. Teams were able to move and install SN11 onto Mount B on the same day along with already having installed 3 Raptor engines while it was in the High Bay.
Next up for SN11 is possibly a pressure test to ensure no wields or seals are bad before going through with a static fire of the three engines. We could still see a flight by the end of this month if everything goes smoothly but as history shows us, a successful static may take some time.
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