Aug. 27 (UPI) -- After an aborted attempt earlier this week, SpaceX's Starhopper test vehicle completed its highest flight yet Tuesday, taking off and landing at a launch site on the Texas coast.

In less than 2 minutes, the vehicle rose nearly 500 feet into the air, traveled to a landing pad 328 feet away and descended, landing in an upright position.

The Starhopper is the test prototype for SpaceX's Starship, a fully reusable second stage and space vehicle that will be integrated into the company's BFR "Super Heavy" rocket. Once in space, Starship will be used to launch and land from other planets and satellites -- from the moon to Mars, for example.

SpaceX attempted to launch the Starhopper on Monday, but officials aborted the test flight after the craft's methane-burning Raptor rocket engine failed to ignite.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that a wiring problem inside the engine's igniter was to blame for the engine failure.

"Raptor uses dual redundant torch igniters," Musk tweeted. "Better long-term, but more finicky in development."

The test site from which the Starhopper launched is adjacent to Boca Chica Village, Texas, a small town 20 miles east of Brownsville. Residents were warned that a malfunction during the test flight could trigger an overpressure event strong enough to blow out windows in nearby homes.

The warning advised residents to go outside during the test flight.

"At a minimum, you must exit your home or structure and be outside of any building on your property....to avoid or minimize the risk of injury," officials warned residents, according to the Brownsville Herald.

Starhopper made its initial untethered flight, rising 65 feet into the air, last month. Flaming debris from that flight ignited brush fires the scored 100 acres in South Texas' Las Palomas Wildlife Management Refuge.

Tuesday's test flight will be the last for this particular prototype. Later this year, SpaceX will begin testing larger prototypes at suborbital heights. </s> This afternoon, a prototype of SpaceX’s next generation rocket took to the skies for a second time in south Texas, reaching a height of a small skyscraper before landing back on Earth. The flight demonstrated the vehicle’s ability to take off and land in a controlled manner, and it paves the way for more aggressive testing of the vehicle’s design in the months ahead.

The test, commonly referred to as a “hop” test, marked the highest flight yet of SpaceX’s prototype, nicknamed “Starhopper.” Equipped with one main engine, the vehicle flew for the first time on July 25th, but it only got about 60 feet (18 meters) off the ground, and the entire scene was shrouded in plumes of exhaust. Today, Starhopper provided a more impressive sight when it took off from SpaceX’s test site in Boca Chica, Texas, slowly climbing to its target altitude of around 500 feet (150 meters). Once there, the vehicle hovered in the air a full minute, before using its engine to land gently back down on the ground.

the vehicle hovered in the air a full minute

Starhopper’s tests are supposed to evaluate the design and hardware that’ll be used on the company’s future Starship rocket, a monster spaceship that SpaceX is developing to send people and cargo to deep space destinations like the Moon and Mars. Towering around 180 feet (55 meters) tall, Starship is meant to launch from Earth on top of a giant rocket booster called Super Heavy. When it reaches other worlds, the vehicle will land upright with its onboard engines, similar to how SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets land on the ground today. It’s also supposed to take off again from these distant destinations to return to Earth.

On these test flights, SpaceX has been testing a new engine called Raptor, which the company plans to use to power Starship. Starhopper has only been flying with one Raptor, but the final Starship design calls for the spaceship to have six Raptor engines. Three will be optimized to work best in our planet’s atmosphere at sea level, and the other three will be designed to work best in the vacuum of space.

Soon, SpaceX will add more engines to its test flights. The company has been building two new prototype rockets: one in Boca Chica and another at a SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, near where the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy fly. These two test vehicles are a bit more robust than the Starhopper, which was never meant to be a faithful replica of Starship. (The top portion of Starhopper also fell over during a particularly gnarly wind storm in Texas, and SpaceX opted not to replace it.)

The newer prototypes will be equipped with three engines each as well as grid fins for steering and better landing gear. The two are meant to perform a series of hop tests that could reach as high as 12 miles (20 kilometers) up in the months ahead. Eventually, SpaceX will fly prototypes that are supposed to achieve orbit during the first launches to space, once SpaceX finishes the Super Heavy booster. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also noted that the two teams building these prototypes are in a friendly race to reach space first. However, the rules aren’t super strict, it seems. “A success by both in close proximity would be amazing & each would count as a win,” Musk tweeted in August.

After performing just two hops, the Starhopper is officially being retired

After performing just two hops, the Starhopper is officially being retired as SpaceX focuses on the next prototype rockets. Starhopper will become a souped-up engine test stand where SpaceX can ignite Raptor engines vertically to see how they perform, according to Musk.

Now that this latest test is complete, Musk is poised to give an update on the Starship’s design and progress. Originally, he planned to give a talk at Boca Chica on August 24th, following the 500-foot flight. However, Musk pushed back the event after the Federal Aviation Administration was slow to approve Starhopper’s flight, forcing SpaceX to delay the test until Monday, August 26th. Musk recently suggested that the talk would occur as soon as mid-September, once the three raptor engines are attached to the Boca Chica test vehicle. </s> Aug. 27 (UPI) -- SpaceX will once again attempt to launch its Starhopper test vehicle. Monday's test flight was aborted after the craft's methane-burning Raptor rocket engine failed to ignite.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that a wiring problem inside the engine's igniter was to blame for the engine failure.

"Raptor uses dual redundant torch igniters," Musk tweeted. "Better long-term, but more finicky in development."

Tuesday's attempt is scheduled for 5:00 p.m. ET. The launch will be streamed live online by several different sources.

The Starhopper is the test prototype for SpaceX's Starship, a fully reusable second stage and space vehicle that will be integrated into the company's BFR "Super Heavy" rocket. Once in space, Starship will be used to launch and land from other planets and satellites -- from the moon to Mars, for example.

If all goes as planned, Tuesday's test flight will see the vehicle ascend to 492 feet before executing a controlled descent to a landing pad 328 feet away.

The test site from which the Starhopper will launch is adjacent to Boca Chica Village, Texas, a small town 20 miles east of Brownsville. Residents were warned that a malfunction during the test flight could trigger an overpressure event strong enough to blow out windows in nearby homes.

The warning advised residents to go outside during the test flight. According to the written warning, a siren will sound ten minutes prior to the launch.

"At a minimum, you must exit your home or structure and be outside of any building on your property....to avoid or minimize the risk of injury," officials warned residents, according to the Brownsville Herald.

Starhopper made its initial untethered flight, rising just 65 feet into the air, last month. Flaming debris from that flight ignited brush fires the scored 100 acres in South Texas' Las Palomas Wildlife Management Refuge.

Tuesday's test flight will be the last for this particular prototype. Later this year, SpaceX will begin testing larger prototypes at suborbital heights. </s> SpaceX launched its sub-scale Starship “hopper” spacecraft on a brief unpiloted up-and-down test flight at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test facility Tuesday, a dramatic demonstration of rocket technology intended to pave the way to a new, more powerful heavy lift booster and, eventually, crew-carrying interplanetary spacecraft.

Running a day late because of a last-second technical glitch, the squat Starhopper’s powerful methane-fueled Raptor engine thundered to life at 6:02 p.m. EDT, pushing the stubby test vehicle straight up into a clear blue sky atop a jet of flame and a churning cloud of exhaust.

A drone’s eye view of SpaceX’s Starhopper test vehicle blasting off from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test facility. SpaceX

The spacecraft, shaped a bit like R2-D2 from the “Star Wars” movies, appeared to reach its FAA-approved 492-foot (150-meter) altitude limit, moved sideways and slowly descended to an on-target touchdown at a nearby landing pad. The approximately one-minute flight was the rocket’s second “untethered” test following a July jump to an altitude of about 65 feet.

Soaring to an altitude of about 500 feet, the Starhopper test vehicle slewed sideways before descending. SpaceX

The hardware SpaceX is testing is intended for a fully reusable two-stage vehicle featuring a powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy Rocket, and the winged Starship.

After an approximately one-minute flight, the test vehicle safely landed. SpaceX

The hopper is a sub-scale version of the Starship’s propulsion system, the first to utilize a SpaceX-designed Raptor engine burning cryogenic methane with liquid oxygen.

SpaceX said the new booster-Starship system eventually will replace the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as the Cargo and Crew Dragon capsules used to deliver supplies and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station.

“SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy Rocket are designed to deliver satellites to Earth orbit and beyond, at a lower marginal cost per launch than our current Falcon vehicles,” the company says on its website.

With a 30-foot-wide payload compartment, the Starship will be able to launch larger payloads to Earth orbit than current rocket systems and deliver crews and supplies to the space station, the company says, adding that in the long term, Starship also will be able to deliver crews and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the company’s “aspirational goal” is to launch an initial cargo mission to Mars in 2022, followed by a crewed flight as early as 2024. Musk is expected to deliver an update on the rocket’s development soon and those targets could change. </s> In a video posted online, the SpaceX Starhopper vehicle, which shares some resemblance to an R2-D2 droid, successfully took off from a test site in Boca Chica, Texas, hopping to a 150-meter altitude and then automatically landing on a nearby pad. Cold gas thrusters helped the vehicle to stabilize itself as it moved towards the landing pad.

​The vehicle on the video is the same Starhopper that conducted an 18-meter altitude test earlier in July, according to NasaSpaceflight’s Michael Baylor.

​Before the test hop began, local residents were asked to relocate or at least step outside, because the Raptor engine could create a pressure wave that could potentially shatter windows. The test also warranted the closure of nearby roads between 2 pm and midnight – potentially giving SpaceX enough time for a second test.

​The Raptor engines are designed for the upcoming BFR rocket which Musk hopes will take humans on their first mission to Mars. The booster alone is expected to have 35 Raptor engines, while the full stack is speculated to be up to 41 engines, if Musk’s July tweets are to be believed. In upcoming tests, SpaceX will test several Raptor engines at once, starting with three instead of just one, NasaSpaceflight says. </s> SpaceX’s stubby rocket Starhopper shot into the air Tuesday afternoon in a test launch that brings Elon Musk’s company closer to his vision of human travel to Mars.

The test was Starhopper’s second and highest hop. The craft — a test vehicle for the Raptor engine that will be included in more sophisticated prototypes — was intended to fly about 500 feet in the air Tuesday.

Shortly after 5 p.m. CDT, the rocket spewed a stream of flame from its bottom as it flew into the air, rising above the cloud of smoke its launch created. It remained upright and gently drifted sideways as it climbed, peaked and descended, then touched down a short distance away from the launch site. The flight lasted about a minute. When the smoke cleared, Starhopper appeared intact.

The craft is set to be retired after Tuesday’s flight and cannibalized for parts as the company ramps up work on Starship, the rocket it hopes to send to Mars.

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Last month Starhopper made its first-ever flight, hovering for a number of seconds before landing back on the ground. That test was intended to reach an altitude of about 65 feet. In a July 25 tweet, SpaceX Chief Executive Musk called the flight successful and cheered that “water towers can fly,” a reference to the prototype’s squat, rounded appearance.

SpaceX worked last year on Starhopper at its lesser-known Boca Chica facility in south Texas, before Musk announced work on the prototype at the end of the year and unveiled renderings in January.

Renderings of the Starhopper prototype showed a bullet-shaped stainless steel tube. But in January, Musk tweeted that strong winds had damaged the nose cone. SpaceX decided not to bother making a replacement and instead to do tests without a nose cone, giving the rocket its stubby water tower appearance.

Meanwhile, the Hawthorne company is building other, more complex prototypes of its Mars spaceship. SpaceX workers in Boca Chica and in Cocoa Beach, Fla., are building spaceship prototypes that will have at least three Raptor engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen. The teams will be doing “simultaneous competing builds” at their respective sites to “see which location is most effective,” Musk tweeted in May. “Answer might be both,” he said.

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He said last month that one of the prototypes could hopefully fly several thousand feet in a few months.

SpaceX plans to eventually replace its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, its newer Falcon Heavy rocket and its Dragon capsule with the Starship Mars spaceship and Super Heavy rocket booster.

Starship is intended to carry as many as 100 passengers to the moon and Mars. Last September, the company announced that Japanese e-commerce billionaire Yusaku Maezawa would be the first paying customer to travel around the moon on the vehicle. Maezawa has said his flight will occur in 2023.

Musk has not been shy about SpaceX’s goal of turning humans into a multiplanetary species to protect against any potential extinction on Earth. The company’s current revenue streams are decidedly more terrestrial in nature — satellite launches for commercial and government customers and supply runs for NASA to the International Space Station.

SpaceX’s plans to reach Mars are a cornerstone of the company — employees recently wore shirts that read “Occupy Mars,” and the company’s online store started selling shirts that say, “Nuke Mars,” which refer to Musk’s Twitter musings on how to warm up the Red Planet. </s> SpaceX

SpaceX’s Mars prototype spacecraft, Starhopper, has flown for the last time in an astonishing flight that it saw it hover 150 meters above the ground, as Elon Musk’s company moves ever close to reaching the Red Planet.

The historic flight took place today, Tuesday, August 27 at 5.02 P.M. local time from SpaceX’s Boca Chica test site in Texas, where Starhopper has been under development, after approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Here, the vehicle’s single methane-powered Raptor engine lifted Starhopper into the air, with the flight in total lasting 57 seconds before it landed back softly on its landing legs.

"One day Starship will land on the rusty sands of Mars," Musk tweeted after the flight.

This is the second flight for Starhopper, after a first last month that saw it “hop” about 20 meters above the ground. But this much higher flight showed off the capabilities of the vehicle even further, the successor of which SpaceX hopes will one day take humans to Mars.

This second flight, which was delayed from a first attempt yesterday, used the same Raptor engine that was used in the first hop, according to NasaSpaceFlight. A significant difference this time was that Starhopper did not just go up and down – it actually moved in the air and landed at a slightly to the side of where it took off from, proving it can maneuver while hovering.

About ten minutes prior to the flight, locals were evacuated from the nearby Boca Chica Village in case there were any problems with the launch, which could have caused a shockwave that shattered nearby windows. Fortunately, there didn't turn out to be any problems.

The spacecraft gracefully took to the air after its engine roared to life, rising high above the ground before shimmying sideways and coming in for a gentle landing. As the smoke cleared the vehicle looked in good condition, and it will now be retired after a job well done.

Starhopper, made of stainless steel, measures about 20 meters tall and nine meters across. It is a smaller version of a bigger vehicle SpaceX is developing called Starship, which will be 55 meters tall. This reusable spaceship is designed to carry up to 100 people into space, launching atop a large rocket also in development called Super Heavy.

Together, Starship and Super Heavy will use 41 of SpaceX’s innovative Raptor engines to reach space, with the potential for the engine to be refueled on other worlds such as Mars. SpaceX is currently busy building two early Starship vehicles and hopes to begin fully-fledged launches in the 2020s.

Starhopper has been under construction since 2018, with these two tests now signaling a fairly rapid development of the vehicle. Today’s higher hop was designed to see just how well the vehicle could operate at altitude.

SpaceX

When Starship eventually starts launching, the idea is that it will be able to repeatedly launch and land at different locations, building on the success of the company's reusable Falcon boosters.

Proving this repeated launch and landing is possible is a major goal for SpaceX to show the possibilities of Starship and Super Heavy. The two could be used to transport people to different locations on Earth, according to Musk, as well as also taking people to space.

Ultimately, Musk has said both vehicles could replace his company’s existing fleet of Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft to carry satellites, cargo, and humans into space.

Following this flight Starhopper will not fly again. However, it will live on; SpaceX plans to use it as a stand to test its Raptor engines in the future on the ground. The focus will now shift to the full Starship vehicles, one of which could take to the skies as early as next year.

If everything goes to plan, this grand Starhopper finale will herald a fascinating period in SpaceX's short history of a little over a decade. If it really can get Starship flying, building on the success of Starhopper, then Mars very well may be in reach.

Musk says he will provide an update on SpaceX's progress with Starship in mid-September. And all will be watching with bated breath to see what comes next. </s> SpaceX has completed a second low-altitude test flight of its ‘Starhopper’ demonstration prototype, which is being used to test technologies that will be used to build the full-scale next-generation SpaceX ‘Starship’ spacecraft. This test involved ‘hopping’ the Starhopper (hence the name, get it?) to a height of around 150m (or a little under 500 feet), the highest it’s flown so far, at a SpaceX test facility in Texas. After the hop, which lasted around 50 seconds (the GIF above is sped up 2X) it successfully navigated itself to a target landing pad a short distance away.

This is the second untethered test trip for the Starhopper, and will is intended to be its last, as SpaceX moves forward with construction of its Starship Mk I and Mk II prototypes, which is taking place currently and simultaneously at sites in Florida and Texas. Today’s attempt was the second try after a planned test yesterday was aborted at the last second, with SpaceX resetting and ensuring everything was in place for this longer hop, which lasted just under a minute.

In July, SpaceX ran its first untethered hop, which is designed to test the operation of the Raptor engine SpaceX is developing for Starship, along with other subsystems for use in the production Starship. That flew only for around 22 seconds, and attained a height of just 20 meters (a little over 65 feet).

Construction is currently in progress at both SpaceX’s Texas and Florida facilities on its full-scale Starship prototypes, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is ambitious will begin their own flight testing later this year, in perhaps as little as a few months. The larger prototypes, which should be closer to what will actually launch, will test more Raptor engines working together and aim to fly to higher altitudes, another key step as the company works towards a true first orbital test flight.

Ultimately, SpaceX is hoping to replace both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy entirely with different configurations of Starship, which will help the company in terms of cost efficiency thanks to its fully reusable nature, and streamlining all of its rocket construction efforts around one type of vehicle. </s> Image copyright SpaceX Image caption The Raptor engine was fired at SpaceX's test facility in McGregor, Texas

Private firm SpaceX has carried out its first test of the Raptor rocket engine, designed to send humans to Mars.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced that the engine had been fired at the company's facility in McGregor, Texas.

If his vision is realised, it could power a super-heavy launch vehicle that would transport people to the Red Planet in coming decades.

But sending astronauts on round trips to our neighbour remains a formidable challenge.

Beyond the astronomical cost, there are the technical hurdles - currently unsolved - of protecting humans from the radiation levels they would be exposed to, once in deep space.

Mr Musk is set to outline his vision for a programme to colonise Mars at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday.

His announcement is being watched closely because SpaceX has already made several landmark achievements for a private space company, including successful upright landings of orbital rocket stages.

In an earlier series of tweets, Mr Musk pointed out the "Mach diamonds" in a picture of the engine test.

This is the name given to a type of wave pattern that appears in the supersonic exhaust plume of a rocket engine or jet engine.

When the Raptor was first announced in 2012, SpaceX said it would be several times more powerful than the Merlin 1 family of engines designed to power the company's Falcon launch vehicles.

And, unlike the Merlin engines, which use a combination of refined kerosene and liquid oxygen as fuel, the Raptor will be powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

Raptor engines could eventually lift SpaceX's Mars Colonial Transport (MCT) towards the Red Planet.

For Mr Musk, Tuesday's speech should offer welcome respite from dealing with the fall-out of the company's launch pad explosion in September, which destroyed one of the company's Falcon 9 launchers and its payload - an Israeli-built communications satellite for Facebook.
SpaceX executes a successful test of its Starhopper vehicle at Boca Chica. The vehicle was raised 150 metres (490 feet) into the air by its methane-fueled Raptor engine. The engine is planned for use on SpaceX's Starship vehicle – a crewed spacecraft capable of interplanetary flight.