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After it conducted a historic static fire test of 31 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster earlier today, SpaceX has released new footage of the event. The test saw nearly all engines on the massive rocket booster light up together for the first time in its design history, and according to SpaceX, the test met the duration it was planned for. A static fire, even as small as this one, is a crucial step for the company to certify the rocket for its orbital test flight internally. This event will officially pave the way for its regular launch cadence.

SpaceX Shares Super Heavy Booster Hot Fire Test Firing Footage From Multiple Angles

SpaceX tested the Super Heavy rocket booster, which stands at a stunning 230 feet tall, equal to the first and second stages of the company's operational Falcon 9 rocket. Not only is Starship taller than the Falcon 9, but it also generates ten times the thrust. While the Falcon 9 uses nine Merlin 1D engines capable of churning out 192,000 pounds of thrust at sea level each, the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor 2 engines are designed to churn out a massive 510,000 pounds of thrust each.

Naturally, this makes the Starship the largest rocket in the world, surpassing NASA's equally massive Space Launch System (SLS), which stands at 322 feet when fully stacked and churns out 8.8 million pounds of thrust. Testing this beast is not a task for the faint of heart, but SpaceX did not disappoint today when it finally made the first eagerly anticipated attempt at lighting up all the Raptors.

The test made for some of the best visuals we have seen from the aerospace company's remarkable rockets - and that's no small feat. SpaceX's launches have shown its rockets splitting up mid-air while traveling thousands of kilometers per hour and then landing on land and in the sea.

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Initially, SpaceX had planned to test all 33 Raptor engines on Starship. But as the test started, details shared by its chief Mr. Elon Musk revealed that one of these engines had shut down itself and SpaceX had to turn off another one. While on the surface, this seems like a rather minor inconvenience, especially considering the sheer number of engines on the Super Heavy, digging a little deeper shows that this tiny problem can provide clues into the Super Heavy booster's design.

When fuel and oxidizer are fed into a rocket engine, engineers must ensure they are kept at the correct pressure. This is because the combustion chamber of an engine is built on a careful balance of propellants flowing in, and a change in pressure changes the speed at which the liquids flow inside it. A low or high pressure can cause engine failure or destruction, and a loss of pressure on the Raptor engine is something that SpaceX has repeatedly struggled with on this design.

SpaceX's previous round of Starship tests took place in 2021, involving the upper stage Starship spacecraft. Two of these tests were partial failures due to a loss of engine pressure, and the complex plumbing on the Super Heavy compounds the adverse effects of these problems. Super Heavy uses what is called autogenous pressurization in astronautics to ensure that the tanks feed the propellants at the right pressure into the engines.

The fact that one engine shut down on its own and engineers had to shut down another indicates that adjacent engines depend on each other for proper performance (pure speculation on our part). This bit is crucial, as uneven pressure within the system can cause bubbles if excessive propellants flow into one engine and are blocked from going into the other. These bubbles, called cavitation, are the bane of rocket engine designers as they lead up to the destruction of an engine. In our view, turning one engine off in case another fails would equalize the pressure at which the propellants are flowing into all other engines. Otherwise, a disastrous overpressurization could cause a catastrophe.

SpaceX's drone footage of the Super Heavy static fire shows the test from a height of hundreds of feet, and captures the complete fireball without the dust that blocked the view of the test. You can take a look at it below.

Views from drone of Booster 7's static fire test pic.twitter.com/KN4sk1nohf

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 9, 2023