Launch window opens Thursday at 8:28 a.m. and closes at 9:30 a.m.
The company has spent years developing the fully reusable Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft in Boca Chica, outside of Brownsville. It has launched Starship prototypes on high-altitude flight tests —The first launch attempt was scrubbed on Monday. Instead of igniting the engines, SpaceX turned the day's activities into a wet dress rehearsal. It practiced loading the rocket with propellant but did not fire the engines.
That's twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon with 7.6 million pounds of thrust. Super Heavy also surpasses NASA's Space Launch System rocket thatSuper Heavy has 33 engines. No rocket has launched with so many before. Current U.S. rockets have no more than nine engines in a single booster, though the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket combines three Falcon 9 boosters, for a total of 27 engines.
But why so many? Smith said it comes down to redundancy. Think of a commercial airliner. If one engine goes out, the plane typically has one, two or three other engines that will get it to a comfortable landing."Will it work?" Smith asked."Because operationally it has not been proven."Smith will consider the mission a success if Super Heavy survives the 2 minutes and 49 seconds its engines are supposed to be ignited.
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