I managed to miss the latest SpaceX test of their Starhopper spacecraft from last month. Here’s NewScientist’s description of Starhopper:
Starhopper is a scaled down prototype for SpaceX’s planned Starship spacecraft. Starship is planned to be the top half of the ship that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he will use to send humans to Mars, where it will land upright with the capacity to take off again.
The final Starship will be powered by six Raptor engines, which are also being developed by SpaceX, but Starhopper only has one, so it doesn’t make true launches, just smaller “hops” to check the design. This test was also the first time a Raptor engine has flown. When the engine itself was tested at full power on 16 July an enormous fireball engulfed the entire spacecraft, and a second fire occurred during testing on 24 July. But neither fire seems to have done any damage and the problems appear to have been fixed – 25 July’s test did not have any unexpected conflagration.
This latest test was a 150 meter hop.
I wonder if the software used to land the boosters used with their commercial aircraft is also substantially used for Starhopper and the future Starship vehicles, or if it’s redeveloped.
