SpaceX Presents Super Heavy Booster With 29 Raptor Engines

California (USA) – Elon Musk recently posted a video showing the new “Super Heavy Booster” launch site.

Super Heavy Booster moving to orbital launch mount pic.twitter.com/axaDnXNm84

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2021

The Super Heavy Booster 4 has been assigned to Starship’s first orbital test flight. Booster 4 left the site it was built at and rolled to the orbital launch site along with 29 Raptor Engines. After a short test run with Booster 3 that focussed on cryo proofing and a static fire test, the next step will be the first integrated stack of a Super Heavy booster and a Starship vehicle.

In only 14 hours SpaceX mounted 29 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster 4, including 20 boost variants along with 9 center variants. It seems to be a new speed record for SpaceX, as never before in the history of spaceflight so many rocket engines have been installed in such a short amount of time. At this time it is not clear yet, if all will be used in the final launch, so some engines might be removed after more testing.

The large single-core rocket is about 70 meters tall and has a diameter of 9 meters. Its thrust is approximately double of what the Saturn V rocket had which NASA astronauts used to get to the Moon. The Super Heavy booster has been built to launch the Starship rocket to the Moon, Mars and possibly even further into space. SpaceX is also in the final stages of finishing “Ship 20” the latest Starship prototype that will be placed on top of Booster 4.